Birmingham Museums Trust (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), Birmingham, United Kingdom.
Location History:
The artwork is securely held in the collection of the Birmingham Museums Trust under the accession number 1885P2529
William James Müller’s 1843 oil painting Prayers in the Desert isn’t just another landscape—it is honestly a massive milestone for British art. Measuring roughly 104.5 by 184 centimeters, it actually holds the distinct title of being the very first British painting to ever depict Islamic religious practices and specific prayer postures.
When you look at the canvas, the artist drops you straight into this vast, atmospheric Middle Eastern desert. The foreground is anchored by a group of Arab men deeply focused on their prayer mats, while a caravan of camels lingers way out in the distance. To get the physical mechanics of the scene perfectly accurate, British artists back then heavily relied on a specific 1836 scholarly book by Edward William Lane called An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.
But Müller definitely wasn't just copying out of textbooks. He was the son of a Prussian immigrant who curated the Bristol Museum, and he actually traveled to the Middle East himself. After spending time in Alexandria and Cairo around 1838 and 1839, he was able to base these atmospheric scenes on authentic, firsthand observations rather than just Victorian imagination.
The craziest part of this painting’s history is how much it influenced other artists. People were so obsessed with it that William Radclyffe produced an engraving of it for the Art-Union Journal in 1847. It also became a literal study guide. A contemporary painter named Joseph Austin Benwell—who was also heavily tied to the Bristol art scene—went out of his way to create a much smaller, 17x30cm watercolor replica of this exact same composition.
This piece—which now hangs in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery—perfectly captures that intense 19th-century fascination with Orientalism. It completely steps away from the usual British subjects of the era to give viewers a grounded, heavily researched look at an entirely different culture.
This canvas of Müller occupies a curious and important place in British art history, not merely for its scale but for what it dared to depict. At a time when British painting rarely ventured beyond its own cultural and religious frameworks, Müller offered viewers something genuinely unprecedented, a considered, respectful rendering of Islamic prayer postures, grounded in real observation rather than imagined exoticism. Müller had actually walked the streets of Alexandria and Cairo, and that lived experience shows in the specificity of gesture and posture among the praying figures in the foreground.
