Giulio Rosati

While Rosati's Orientalist compositions owed much to his imagination (here he conjures up a scene of the Harem), the actual interiors and props are masterfully observed in minute detail. This work in particular is precisely executed and Rosati has filled the composition with brightly coloured carpets and intricately patterned walls.

Rosati trained at the Accademia di San Luca and studied with the painter, architect and poet Francesco Podesti and with Dario Querci, a portraitist and history painter. He then joined the studio of the popular Spanish history and genre painter Luis Alvarez Catalá in Rome. Catalá belonged to the colony of Spanish painters in Rome, led by Mariano Fortuny, whose Orientalist works met with great critical acclaim in Rome in the 1860s and which would have been an inspiration to aspiring Italian Orientalists like Rosati.