Interior of the Grand Mosque, Damascus

Interior of the Grand Mosque, Damascus, painted in oil on canvas in 1874 and held at the Harris Museum in Preston, depicts the interior of the Umayyad Mosque — one of the most significant religious buildings in the world, built in the early eighth century on the site of a Christian basilica that had itself been built over a Roman temple. Leighton visited Damascus in 1873 and made extensive studies of the mosque's interior. The Umayyad Mosque's great prayer hall, with its enormous arcaded nave, mosaics, and the distinctive quality of light filtering through high windows, was architecturally unmatched among surviving early Islamic buildings. Leighton's serious engagement with the architecture was unusual among Victorian painters, who more often depicted Islamic buildings as exotic backdrop than as subjects of architectural analysis.

The interior of the Umayyad Mosque presented one of the most demanding architectural light studies in Islamic architecture: the great prayer hall's vast arcaded space, filled with diffused overhead light and the reflective qualities of marble floor and mosaic wall surfaces. Leighton must distinguish the architectural proportions of the space — massive columns, high arches, the great width of the nave — while rendering the specific quality of the interior's light.