After completing an apprenticeship with his artist father, Eduard Hildebrandt moved from his native town of Danzig to Berlin, where he was taken under the wing of Wilhelm Krause, a sea and landscape painter. His early travels mainly involved trips to Paris to study French art, but the 1840s and 1850s saw him venture further afield to America, Brazil, England, Portugal, Spain, Madeira, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece.

These trips were to be outdone only by his monumental trip around the world in the 1860s, when he travelled from Trieste to India, China, Japan, the Pacific, and back through California and Central America. During all of these journeys, he painted many of the landscapes he saw, first using oils but later moving onto watercolours.

After returning to Berlin, Hildebrandt made many of his sketches and paintings into chromolithograph prints, which were popular due to their exotic charm and rich colour palette, and secured Hildebrandt’s artistic reputation. These were eventually compiled in a single volume published by C. Wagner and entitled ‘Auf seiner Reise um die Erde’.

Among the prints was a chromolithograph of an oil painting of Jerusalem that Hildebrandt had made during his earlier travels. While the walled city appears in the centre of the image, the main focus is on the surrounding landscape. The rugged terrain undulates wildly, its yellow-brown aridity offset against the occasional cluster of trees. Hills and mountains recede into darkness in the background, while in the foreground, on the western slopes of the Mount of Olives, a group of seven pilgrims is scarcely visible in their muted robes and head-coverings.