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Lot Essay
The most important and gifted of the Italian Orientalist painters, Alberto Pasini spent several years in the Near East, spread over repeated trips to Persia, Egypt and, above all, Istanbul. Although his contemporaries thought of him as a talented landscape and architectural painter, Pasini also excelled at busy scenes of everyday life, especially in his Orientalist pictures. He was influenced early on by the painters Théodore Rousseau and Eugène Fromentin in the 1850s, but went on to develop his own distinctive style. The key attraction of Pasini is his lively depictions of ordinary citizens, romanticized to some extent, but full of accurate detail. Markets were a particular favorite of his. He faithfully rendered the clarity and brilliance of the light and color of the East, contrasted here and there with subtle wisps of smoke or steam – as in the present painting coming from the tea shop at far left. This became a trademark of the artist, perhaps his attempt to represent somehow the haze of memory as he looked back on his travels. His pictures are often easy to recognize because of his love of intense blue and turquoise, these often forming the major color notes in his paintings.
Pasini eschewed the exotic style of Orientalism for a more documentary approach to the subject, derived from countless plein-air studies of figures, architecture, and sites of public gathering such as mosques and marketplaces. His works are notable above all for the delicacy of their colors, and for the masterful rendition of light and shadow, both of which were realized with the application of very thin paint layers onto fine canvases. Here the light pinks, blues and aquamarines, and the contrast between the sunlit facades and the strongly shaded bazaar entrance are among the most characteristic hallmarks of the artist. Also typical is the composition, which is entirely filled with architecture, avoiding a horizon line or even any glimpse of sky. The picture plane is thus entirely filled with decorative motifs, and the only sense of depth results from the receding shadows of the archway.
Two related watercolors of almost identical architectural composition, dating from the early 1870s, allow us to locate this bazaar entrance in Constantinople. In the early 1870s Pasini had just returned from an extended trip to the Ottoman capital, and in the wake of this trip devoted himself almost exclusively to paintings of that city, which were executed in his studio from sketches he had made during his travels. Though it is hard to pinpoint the exact location with certainty, it is possible that the present painting depicts the entrance to the Misir Çarsisi, also called the Egyptian Market, which was close to many other locations depicted in Pasini’s Ottoman paintings, and which can partially be seen in the distance in the background of the artist’s 1873 Salon entry. A contemporary photograph of the market entrance (fig. 1) shows a similarly large archway with built in stalls for vendors that contains a smaller inset archway edged with ablaq, or black and white stonework, as in the present painting. The elegant floral decorative crest above the smaller arch was probably added by the artist, but is a motif he frequently repeats in his Ottoman pictures. Despite their apparent photographic attention to detail, the figures in Pasini's paintings were frequently assembled from his many drawings. The figure observed from behind running into the bazaar and the nuanced gestures and expressions of the different clusters of people engaged in barter or conversation all provide a sense of extraordinary immediacy, but some of them can be found repeated in other works by Pasini, across a variety of different locations depicted by the artist.
(fig. 1) Sebah & Joaillier, Photograph of Misir Carsisi.
Pasini eschewed the exotic style of Orientalism for a more documentary approach to the subject, derived from countless plein-air studies of figures, architecture, and sites of public gathering such as mosques and marketplaces. His works are notable above all for the delicacy of their colors, and for the masterful rendition of light and shadow, both of which were realized with the application of very thin paint layers onto fine canvases. Here the light pinks, blues and aquamarines, and the contrast between the sunlit facades and the strongly shaded bazaar entrance are among the most characteristic hallmarks of the artist. Also typical is the composition, which is entirely filled with architecture, avoiding a horizon line or even any glimpse of sky. The picture plane is thus entirely filled with decorative motifs, and the only sense of depth results from the receding shadows of the archway.
Two related watercolors of almost identical architectural composition, dating from the early 1870s, allow us to locate this bazaar entrance in Constantinople. In the early 1870s Pasini had just returned from an extended trip to the Ottoman capital, and in the wake of this trip devoted himself almost exclusively to paintings of that city, which were executed in his studio from sketches he had made during his travels. Though it is hard to pinpoint the exact location with certainty, it is possible that the present painting depicts the entrance to the Misir Çarsisi, also called the Egyptian Market, which was close to many other locations depicted in Pasini’s Ottoman paintings, and which can partially be seen in the distance in the background of the artist’s 1873 Salon entry. A contemporary photograph of the market entrance (fig. 1) shows a similarly large archway with built in stalls for vendors that contains a smaller inset archway edged with ablaq, or black and white stonework, as in the present painting. The elegant floral decorative crest above the smaller arch was probably added by the artist, but is a motif he frequently repeats in his Ottoman pictures. Despite their apparent photographic attention to detail, the figures in Pasini's paintings were frequently assembled from his many drawings. The figure observed from behind running into the bazaar and the nuanced gestures and expressions of the different clusters of people engaged in barter or conversation all provide a sense of extraordinary immediacy, but some of them can be found repeated in other works by Pasini, across a variety of different locations depicted by the artist.
(fig. 1) Sebah & Joaillier, Photograph of Misir Carsisi.