Amadeo, 5th Count Preziosi, came from one of the foremost families of the Maltese nobility, but found fame in Muslim Turkey, as an artist who depicted, with colour and panache, the life and landscape of Istanbul, in all its cosmopolitan variety. Instead of the legal career that his father had envisaged for him, Preziosi studied art in Paris, and from 1842 was based in Istanbul until his death forty years later. Here he established a very productive studio, painting picturesque views of the city for a wide variety of European visitors. His representations of the capital of the Ottoman Empire were bought by royal, aristocratic and middle-class tourists, who carried them home as vivid reminders of a society that was at the same time both alien and familiar. The particular interest of this group of views, several of them evidently for the same patron, is that at this early date, only a few years after he had arrived in the city, Preziosi was approaching his subjects with a freshness and spontaneity sometimes lacking in his later repetitions of the more predictable views popular with tourists. They also demonstrate his skill in combining incidental detail with an accurate grasp of the complex topography of the Bosphorus. We would like to thank Charles Newton and Briony Llewellyn for their kind assistance in the cataloguing and research of the present collection of works by Preziosi.

Count Amadeo Preziosi (Maltese, 1816-1882)

Goatherders on a hillside above the Golden Horn, Istanbul

Details

Count Amadeo Preziosi (Maltese, 1816-1882)
Goatherders on a hillside above the Golden Horn, Istanbul
signed 'Preziosi' (lower right)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour on paper
13¼ x 19 in. (33.6 x 48.3 cm.)

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Lot Essay

This view shows the city of Istanbul in the distance, with the silhouettes of the great mosques on the skyline, and the Galata and Seraskier towers. The panoramic view must be taken from a high point above what were the barracks of Kuleli in 1849, nowadays the Military High School. The village of Engelköy is seen below, curving round the bay along the shore to the left. In Preziosi's time many Ottoman mansions still stood at the water's edge. Preziosi here displays his skill in depicting both the general and the particular: a wide panoramic view, accurately rendered, is enlivened with local figures, demonstrating the proximity of rural and city life.

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