About this sheet
This is a set of three original antique steel engravings, sold together as one lot, from the first volume of The Turkish Empire Illustrated, published in London by Peter Jackson about 1850. The sheets are, in order: The Medak or Eastern Story Teller; The Turkish Letter Writer; Pilgrims Resting on the Route to Mecca. A storyteller holding forth from a raised platform in a coffee house open to the harbor, one hand flung up as he reaches his point, the listeners pressed in around him smoking long pipes and a waiter bringing a tray of coffee cups at the right. A public letter writer seated cross legged at his low desk outside a mosque, reading back what he has written while two veiled women lean in to correct him, a small richly dressed child holding the elder woman's skirt and minarets rising behind. Four pilgrims halted at a caravanserai on the road to Mecca, one standing with a long gun and a drawn dagger, another seated with a water pipe, two more leaning over the fire, with a row of coffee glasses on the ledge and firelight filling the vault behind.
The plate comes from The Turkish Empire Illustrated: Constantinople and its Environs, with the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, drawn from nature by Thomas Allom with descriptions by the Reverend Robert Walsh, chaplain to the British embassy at the Ottoman Porte. The sheets were engraved on steel for Fisher, Son and Company in the late eighteen thirties and printed again for this edition by Peter Jackson at the Caxton Press in Angel Street, Saint Martin's le Grand, London, with a Liverpool address at Post Office Place, about 1850. The technique is steel engraving, worked by a named London engraver from Allom's own drawing, and the credit lines are printed in the lower corners of the plate with the publisher's imprint centered beneath. Impressions from this series are uncolored as issued, and this sheet has never been colored later.
The medak was the professional reciter of the Ottoman coffee house and the center of its social life, and this is the best known image of the custom, a crowded figure composition with a dozen listening faces worked out individually. The public scribe was how an unlettered city conducted its private business, and this plate catches the transaction exactly, with the pointing finger of the client and the scribe's open mouth doing all the work of the composition. They are three original sheets sold together, and the set is never split. Hung together in matching frames the sheets read as one piece of wall rather than as separate prints, and the uniform plate size makes an even line above a sideboard, a bed or a run of stairs.
Even age toning throughout. Marked handling soiling along the edges of all three sheets. Scattered foxing in the margins of all three sheets. Slight wear at the corners of two of the three sheets.
This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed. Any framed or interior images are shown for presentation and inspiration only, unless the listing explicitly states that the item is sold framed.
