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, 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.