Peshawar

Peshawar depicts the ancient frontier city in what is now northwestern Pakistan, a crossroads settlement that has connected Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent for over two thousand years. In Bartlett's era, Peshawar was the capital of the North-West Frontier Province of British India, a garrison city where the cultures of the Afghan Pashtun borderlands met the administrative apparatus of the British Raj.

Bartlett's oban woodblock print captures the visual character of this frontier city: its bazaars, its mosque minarets, the mix of Afghan, Pashtun, and British colonial architecture, and the constant presence of the mountains that define the northwest frontier landscape. The print extends the geographic range of the Japanese woodblock medium to one of its most remote outposts, depicting a subject that no Japanese printmaker had attempted. Bartlett's watercolorist's eye for atmospheric haze and dust-filtered light serves the arid frontier environment particularly well.