Portrait of a gentleman, half-length, in Ottoman dress, with a jewelled dagger in his belt, standing by a window, a palace beyond

This picture is stylistically consistent with a number of portraits of sitters in Turkish costume executed by Antoine de Favray during his nine-year stay in Constantinople between 1762 and 1771. There, he enjoyed the patronage of the French ambassador, Charles Gravier, marquis de Vergennesm, and his full-length portrait of him, in a private collection (see A. Boppe, Les Peintres du Bosphore au XVIIIe Siècle, Paris, 1989, p. 102), depicts the Ambassador in almost identical headgear as worn by the present sitter and in a similar ermine-trimmed robe and floral patterned tunic. Furthermore, the format of Favray's self-portrait of 1778 in the Uffizi, Florence, in which he depicts himself half-length before a view of the Hagia Sofia, is similarly employed here.