A Mosque

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, much later, monument. It was painted two decades after Pasini befriended the artist Théodore Chassériau after arriving in Paris in 1851. When Chassériau was unable to accompany a diplomatic mission to Persia in 1855, Pasini went instead; it was the first of his numerous visits to the East.