Drawings of the Graeco-Roman theater and propylon (city gate) at Patara in Lycia were commissioned for publication in Antiquities of Ionia. These books recorded the results of expeditions, sponsored by the Society of Dilettanti in London, to little-known archaeological sites on the Turkish coast. Picturing the broken outlines of ancient monuments amid lush undergrowth, MacKenzie's drawings situate the ruins in the natural world from which they appear to have been only temporarily separated. The inscription in front of the theater, "mousoi kai mnemosynes," refers to memory, the mother of the Muses in classical mythology.

The Getty Research Institute Research Library has a number of works by William Gell.