Seated Turk

Richard Parkes Bonington was working in the Paris studio of his friend Eugène Delacroix when he painted this canvas depicting a man in Middle Eastern dress holding a pipe. The costume was based on props in Delacroix’s studio, while the setting was purely imaginary: neither Delacroix nor Bonington had ever visited the Ottoman Empire. The painting was included in an exhibition in Paris held to benefit the Greeks in their battle against the invading Turkish forces. The exhibition also included Ary Scheffer’s Retreat of Napoleon’s Army from Russia in 1812, also on view in The Critique of Reason. Journalistic images of this foreign war spurred a great deal of artistic creation during the Romantic period.