Ippolito Caffi

While painting mainly in Rome and Venice, from autumn 1843 to spring 1844 Caffi travelled to Greece, Palestine, Turkey and Egypt. His personal observation and experiences were recorded in numerous sketches. The present work painted in 1844 depicts a magnificent tobacco merchant standing with his products on the coastline. Caffi celebrates the merchant by depicting him smoking his own wares and engaging directly with the viewer. In Cairo, the first guild of tobacconists were active by the middle decades of the seventeenth century however it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the Egyptian tobacco industry was flourishing.

Caffi attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, studying under Teodoro Matteini, Francesco Bagnara, and Tranquillo Orsi before establishing his reputation as one of Italy's leading ottocento vedutisti, the heir to Canaletto. His views are distinguished by his virtuoso command of spatial construction (in 1835 he published a textbook on perspective, Lezioni di prospettiva pratica, with Antonio Bianchini) and by his striking observation of the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere.