A Mosque

Curatorial Overview

“Pasini here depicts the Yeni Valide Mosque at Eminonu, Istanbul, an Ottoman structure completed in the early eighteenth century. Four women of the Imperial Household enter the mosque by a gateway that Pasini appropriated from another, later, monument. It was painted two decades after Pasini arrived in Paris, in 1851. When a friend, the painter Théodore Chassériau was unable to accompany a French diplomatic mission to Persia in 1855, Pasini went instead; it was the first of his numerous visits to the Middle East.”