Watercolor on Paper of the Parthenon at the Acropolis. Signed indistinctly bottom right. View of the west end of the building through two isolated crumbling columns on the Propylaea. 

Frame: 12 1/4 x 9 1/4 in. 

Sight: 7 x 3 1/4 in.

#2382 . 

The Parthenon is a former temple on the Athenian Acropolis in Greece that was dedicated to the goddess Athena. Its surviving decorative sculptures are considered some of the high points of classical Greek art, and the Parthenon is considered an enduring symbol of Ancient Greece, democracy, and Western civilization. It was built in the 5th Century BC to celebrate the Hellenic victory over the Persian Empire. Changing hands many times throughout the centuries, it was converted to a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the 6th Century AD, before becoming a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in the 15th Century. In 1687 a Venetian bomb landed on it during a siege at the height of the Morean War, and as the Ottomans had chosen to use it as a munitions dump the resulting explosion obliterated most of the interior and caused damage to all the surrounding structures on the Acropolis and the town below for nearly a mile. The miraculous survival of a good portion of the exterior, including the iconic Doric columns, led to its veneration by spiritual and secular organizations alike, and it has since become regarded as the finest example of Greek architecture in history. In the 18th and 19th Centuries the Ottoman Empire declined dramatically, and many Europeans traveled to Athens, leading to a rise in Philhellenism. Painters, sketch artists, and sculptors like Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Carl Oscar Borg created thousands of images of the ruins, particularly from the shade afforded by the nearby Propylaea. Their work aroused sympathy for Greek independence and led to an entire school of Greek artists dedicated to immortalizing the ruins their ancestors had first built. Since 1975 a restoration effort has been underway, with no concrete finish date established.