Portrait of a merchant of the Levant Company in Turkish dress, seated on a Turkish carpet

This exotic portrait of a member of the British Levant Company was painted by the Florentine artist Andrea Soldi during his time in Syria and the Levant, between 1733 and 1735, prior to his arrival in England in circa 1736. The only source for information on Soldi’s early career before his arrival in London is the notebooks of the antiquarian George Vertue, who commented: 'From his own Country [Italy, Soldi] set out to the Holyland [sic.] which he had great desire to see, on his way there or back at Aleppo he became acquainted with some English Merchants whose pictures having drawn with much approbation they advised him to come to England' (G. Vertue, Notebooks 3, c. 1742, p. 109). Relatively few of Soldi's portraits of this rich, powerful and privileged merchant class are recorded. John Ingamells, in his checklist of Soldi's works in the Walpole Society (XLVII, 1980), lists only three portraits from the artist's Aleppan period: two three-quarter-lengths of Thomas Sheppard (signed and dated 1733[?] and 1735/6 respectively; both location unknown; p. 15, nos. 57-8); and a portrait of an unidentified gentleman, small-whole length, with moustache, wearing Turkish trousers and slippers (signed and dated 1735; private collection; p. 17, no. 69). Research into Soldi's portrait of the English merchant Henry Lannoy Hunter (fig. 1; c. 1733-6), acquired by Tate Britain in 2005, has helped put Soldi's early career in the Levant into sharper focus. While the Tate exhibition on Soldi and the English Levant merchants in 2008, which included the present portrait, has brought to light more works from this early, formative period.
Founded by Royal Charter in 1581, the English Levant Company had a monopoly over trade between England and the Ottoman Empire, the term Levant then meaning all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores. Run by a Court of Governors in London and represented by the English Ambassador in Constantinople, its chief trading post was Syria’s ancient trading capital of Aleppo. The city commanded the great trans-desert trading routes between East and West: English woollen broadcloth, tin and lead were bartered chiefly for silk from Antioch, Tripoli, Beirut and most desirably, Persia, as well as spices, coffee, carpets, mohair yarn and other exotic merchandise. An 80-mile journey over the Amanus mountains from its port Scanderoon (Iskenderun, Turkey), Aleppo, with its high citadel, domes and minarets, must have presented an exciting prospect. The English lived within the Khan al-Gumruk, which was situated on the main thoroughfare of the covered, labyrinth-like souk in the heart of the city. Family papers and business records reveal an extraordinarily vivid picture of the merchants’ daily lives in Aleppo, and their first-hand experience of life within the Ottoman Empire.
The English merchant in this portrait is shown in Turkish costume, wearing a turban and a blue, fur-lined kurk over red harem pants. His leather boots suggest that he has recently returned from hunting. In her unpublished MA thesis on Soldi’s Levantine Portraits, Sarah Moulden explained that the merchants’ presentation and style of dress was as much a business strategy as a statement of social intent, since the adoption of local Turkish dress enabled the merchant to integrate with the community in which he sought to live and do business. As one merchant at Aleppo, Edmond Sherman, commented in a letter to his wife in 1696: 'I put myself in the same Turkish fashion, all in crimson colour cloth suitable to French and Dutch nations in the same office at Scanderoon and we all wear large whiskers on our upper lip as the Turks wear, I believe you would hardly know me’ (op. cit., pp. 20-21). Inventories of the goods of those who died in Aleppo include Turkish fur vests, dolmans (long, buttoned silk waistcoats), shacksheers (wide trousers) and the caps and sashes of turbans, as well as western hats, wigs and coats.
Based in Aleppo for up to seven years or more, the merchants were always in search of entertainment: they visited archaeological sites, including Palmyra and the Dead Cities, hunted and dined together. After successful completion of their tenure in the Levant, the merchants would return to London to take up prestigious posts within the Company. It was an established convention for a merchant to have his portrait painted immediately before returning home, therefore preserving for posterity his identity as a ‘Turkish merchant’. Soldi’s portraits so impressed the merchants that they encouraged him to travel to England where his talents set him apart from the old and middle-aged guard of native portrait painters, including Richardson, Dahl, Jervas, Seeman and Vanderbank, and secured him immediate success as a society portrait painter.