Lot Essay
With Giulio Rosati (for example Lot 1), Ettore Simonetti was one of several highly sought-after Roman Orientalist painters who worked together in the studios of the Via Margutta.
Although best known as a watercolourist, Simonetti was a highly accomplished oil painter, who created compositions from a mixture of photographs, props and his own imagination, often varying the same composition or executing the same composition in two different mediums. Indeed there exists a slighly smaller, but otherwise identical, watercolour of this painting (see C. Juler, Les orientalistes de l'école italienne, Paris, 1992, pp. 238-239).
Here Simonetti depicts the carpet merchant laying out his wares in front of an exotically dressed noble woman, while silk merchants ply their trade in the background.
Although best known as a watercolourist, Simonetti was a highly accomplished oil painter, who created compositions from a mixture of photographs, props and his own imagination, often varying the same composition or executing the same composition in two different mediums. Indeed there exists a slighly smaller, but otherwise identical, watercolour of this painting (see C. Juler, Les orientalistes de l'école italienne, Paris, 1992, pp. 238-239).
Here Simonetti depicts the carpet merchant laying out his wares in front of an exotically dressed noble woman, while silk merchants ply their trade in the background.