© Tate 2006, all rights reserved
Purchased from Lane Fine Art (General Funds) with assistance from
Tate Patrons, 2004 and the National Art Collections Fund
T11977
Andrea Soldi was encouraged to settle in England by English merchants of the Levant Company, whose portraits he had painted at Aleppo. This exotic portrait of the English merchant Henry Lannoy Hunter is among Soldi’s most significant works. Hunter is shown in elaborate Turkish attire, including a turban and fur-lined robe, proudly seated on an oriental rug with trophies of the day’s hunting (a frequent pastime of the Aleppo merchants). The distant coastline could well be the bay of Scanderoon – present day Iskenderun – the port which served Aleppo, a panoramic view of which could be had from the Bylan mountains where the British merchants escaped the summer heat or retreated in times of plague. Hunter is known to have been in Aleppo, as a Levant Company factor between 1729 and 1732, but is recorded in London from February 1733. This work, therefore, was either one of those successfully undertaken at Aleppo or was commissioned in England as a result of contacts forged in Aleppo.
Joshua
Reynolds
Andrea
Soldi
Richard
Parkes Bonington
Richard
Dadd