Alberto Pasini

Bessonneau d'Angers collection

Sale: Sotheby's, London, 19 May 1976, lot 142

Private collection, UK

Sale: Christie's, London, 16 June 1995, lot 222

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Salon de 1861, no. 2441

Isabella Lapi Ballerini, 'Comme si c'eut été Jerusalem', in Antichità Viva, XVIII, no. 3, Florence, 1979, p. 44, no. 17

Vittoria Botteri Cardoso, Pasini, Genoa, 1991, p. 260, catalogued, no. 251

This monumental street scene masterfully evokes the hustle and bustle of market day in a Cairo thoroughfare. The moristan (or mosque-hospital complex) whose minaret is seen in the present work is likely that of Kalawun, built in the thirteenth century by Sultan Al-Mansur Qalawun and located on Al-Mu'izz street in the Bayn al-Qasrayn area of Cairo.

Pasini studied at the Academy of Parma, before moving to Paris to study under the great French Romantic painter Théodore Chassériau. The outbreak of the Crimean War offered Pasini the break of a lifetime and launched his career as an Orientalist painter when, in 1855, Chassériau ceded him his place as the official artist for the diplomatic mission to the court of Nasser al-Din Shah in Tehran. His mission completed, Pasini returned through Persia, Armenia and Turkey, the first of many subsequent painting trips to the Ottoman lands, including to Cairo.