Views in Egypt, : from the original drawings in the possession of Sir Robert Ainslie, taken during his embassy to Constantinople, / by Luigi Mayer: engraved by and under the direction of Thomas Milton: with historical observations, and incidental illustrations of the manners and customs of the natives of that country.
Luigi Mayer (1755-1803)
Category
Books
Date
1801
Materials
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 3042097
Summary
Full description
The Scots diplomat Sir Robert Ainslie (1729/30-1812) became British ambassador in Constantinople in 1775. It was a sensitive time for Anglo-Turkish relations. Just five years previously, in 1770, Catherine the Great's Baltic fleet had sailed round Europe to annihilate the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Çeşme Bay, and the Sublime Porte was well aware that the Russian ships had revictualled in England during the course of their epic voyage from St Petersburg to the Aegean. But Ainslie enjoyed good relations with his Turkish hosts; in time, as London's ‘St. James’s Chronicle’ noted in 1790, he became ‘strongly attached to the manner of the people. ‘In his house, his garden, and his table’, it explained, ‘he assumed the style and fashion of a Musselman of rank; in fine, he lived ‘en Turk’’. While in Constantinople, Ainslie combined his official duties with collecting Byzantine and Ottoman coins and antiquities, and he also commissioned a collection of drawings from Italian artist Luigi Mayer (1755-1803). Mayer was a painter and watercolourist, now mostly remembered for his association with Ainslie, though he also produced oils and gouaches, chiefly of scenes in southern Italy and the Levant, monuments to what a later generation would call – with varying degrees of approbation – Orientalism. Text adapted from ‘Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey’, National Trust, 2013.
Bibliographic description
[4], 102, [2] p., [48] leaves of plates ; fol. Plates coloured. Pencil price £3-10-0 and pencil notes (bookseller's codes?) on front free endpaper verso. Provenance: Twentieth-century armorial bookplate large variant, signed Badeley 1930: Urban Huttleston Rogers Lord Fairhaven [i.e.: Urban Huttleston Broughton (1896-1966)]. Binding: Nineteenth-century half calf; marbled paper over boards; recessed cords; spine gilt, lettered direct: 'Mayer's Egypt'; marbled edges; marbled endpapers.
Makers and roles
Luigi Mayer (1755-1803), artist Thomas Milton, engraver (printmaker)
References
Mark Purcell, William Hale and David Person, Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey, Swindon: National Trust; London: Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers, 2013., pp. 80-1