“What I felt on seeing the East I had never felt before.”

At the end of 1851, after a period of academic training and the start of a career as painter and lithographer in Parma, Alberto Pasini left the town for Paris, where he hoped to find more fertile terrain for his artistic ambitions. With the aid of the wellknown engraver Paolo Toschi, he soon managed to develop a close network of professional contacts. As early as 1852, he began to work as a lithographer with the painter Eugène Ciceri, who became his friend. It was at his house in the country at Marlotte near Fontainbleau that Pasini took up painting en plein air and came into contact with the landscape painters of the Barbizon School. He took part in the 1853 Salon and began to work the following year with the Orientalist painter Théodore Chasseriau, who recommended him to serve in his place as draughtsman on a diplomatic mission to Persia with the minister plenipotentiary Prosper Bourée. Pasini thus set off in April 1855 on his first trip to the East, which took eighteen months. He returned with his mind full of vivid impressions and a rich harvest of drawings (some of which now held by the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin as a two-volume set entitled Croquis d’Orient). As he later said with reference to that great adventure: “What I felt on seeing the East I had never felt before.”¹ 

On his return to Paris, he began to present his first paintings and series of lithographs on exotic subjects. Unlike so many of the derivatively fanciful images turned out by artists who jumped onto the bandwagon of Orientalism, these were born out of first-hand knowledge of the places and everyday life. Subsequent travels to North Africa, the Middle East, Constantinople and the Bosporus in complete freedom (in 1860, 1867- 69 and then, for the last time, 1873) provided new material for the artist’s eye: views, colours, buildings, ways of life and physical features all observed with fresh curiosity and scrupulously captured with a sense of involvement. The production of paintings devoted to the Orient and based on memories of personal experience continued until the last years of the artist’s life with constant support from a public enamoured above all of the most finished and richly detailed works featuring lively scenes of urban life amid dazzling buildings and colourful bazars. It is with this genre of easel painting, depicting nameless streets and sun-drenched courtyards, as in this Smirne, casa turca (Smyrna, Turkish House), that Pasini consolidated his reputation as the leading Orientalist.  Even though his sketchbooks are crammed with architectural details, it is impossible to identify the place depicted in this small canvas, not least because he appears to have never actually set foot in Smyrna, present-day Izmir, on the Turkish coast of the Aegean.² 

Described in 1941, under the title Casa turca, as a typical example of “Pasini’s splendid use of draughtsmanship and colour in accordance with the form of things and figures” by Enrico Somaré in L’Esame,³ the painting was owned at the time, together with the artist’s Mercato orientale, by Turin businessman Sebastiano Sandri, chief executive of the Cartiere Burgo paper company and keen collector of 19th-century paintings.⁴ The back of the stretcher still bears an address in Paris, where Pasini continued to take part in exhibitions - while spending increasingly long periods at his villa at Cavoretto in the hills around Turin - during the 1880s (until 1896) and found a market for his works, as attested by the stock books of his dealers, first Goupil and then Boussod et Valadon.⁵ Shown in Milan in the retrospective at the Galleria Centrale d’Arte (1917) and then in Turin at the Galleria della Gazzetta del Popolo Torino (1949), the painting does not appear in the catalogue of the auction held at the Galleria Scopinich, Milan, in 1929 (Collezione Ferria eredi di Alberto Pasini). 

Monica Tomiato 

¹ Quoted in Fleres 1900, p. 30, and A. Villari, “Alberto Pasini”, in Bertone 2009, p. 398. 

² Botteri Cardoso 1991, p. 342. 

³ Somaré 1941, p. 32. 

⁴ Viale 1952-53, p. 235. 

⁵ Now accessible online: http://archives.getty.edu:30008/ getty_images/digitalresources/goupil/goupil.htm.