Ettore Simonetti (Italian, 1857-1909)
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Ettore Simonetti (Italian, 1857-1909)

The carpet merchant

Details
Ettore Simonetti (Italian, 1857-1909)
The carpet merchant
signed and inscribed 'Ettore Simonetti/Roma' (lower left)
oil on canvas
26½ x 35½ in. (67 x 90 cm.)
Painted in Rome.
Special notice
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 15% on the buyer's premium

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.

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