The backgammon players

Giulio Rosati was the most accomplished of a group of Italian Orientalist artists who specialised in watercolour. These included Giuseppe Aureli, Ettore Simonetti and Enrico Tarenghi, all of whom worked in close proximity in the artist studios on the Via Margutta in Rome. Many of these artists, including Rosati, never in fact visited the countries whose characters and customs they depicted, working instead from photographs to create large-scale and highly finished works on paper, more traditionally associated with the hyper-realist oil paintings of artists such as Ludwig Deutsch and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Rosati produced an enormous corpus of work, concentrating on the artefacts and customs which made the Middle East so fascinating to a western audience. Rosati's brilliant colours, and his attention to detail, in many ways made his images more realistic than the photographs on which they were based - a quality which is particularly evident in his extraordinary rendition of fabric and carpets. Like many of his contemporaries both in Italy and France, in addition to photographs, Rosati assembled a huge collection of Middle-Eastern objects which he wove into different compositions to striking effect.
The game of backgammon was one of Rosati's favourite subjects. The game, which has modern origins in Persia, and a version of which can be traced all the way back to Ancient Egypt, is still enormously popular throughout the Middle East. In the present work, however, the nominal subject is of less importance than the attention paid to the tiled and carpeted background against which the players are set, and to the folds of the flowing white drape of the figure on the right.