A View of Mecca, signed by Yuzbashi Helmi, Turkey, 19th century

Oil on canvas, framed

In good overall condition, has recently undergone conservation including a light clean and consolidation of flaking paint in the top left-hand quadrant, as viewed.
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This is a rare and important landscape of the Holy City of Mecca in oil on canvas. Topographic panorama views of Mecca are relatively rare, compared with the stylised diagrams found in prayer books and pilgrimmage texts. A number of prints were produced from the eighteenthth century onwards. Among original painted examples, watercolours predominate, with the majority having been produced in the Indian Subcontinent during the nineteenth century. A Persian watercolour of Mecca was sold in these rooms, 6 April 2011, lot 229, and an Indian example is in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection (see Rogers 2007, cat.298). Oil paintings of Mecca are the rarest type and most are of Ottoman origin, like the present example. An important early eighteenth-century Ottoman oil painting of Mecca is in Uppsala University Library. It was brought to Sweden from Constantinople by Michael Eneman (1676-1714) and was acquired by the University in 1717 (see cover illustration of Islam-Konst och Kultur. Islam-Art and Culture, The Museum of National Antiquities, exhibition catalogue, Stockholm, 1985). It shows Mecca from exactly the same viewpoint as the present work and has a similar composition.

The present painting is bold and striking. The city is seen from a high viewpoint, with the sun casting strong shadows from the upper left. The mosque and the Holy Ka'ba are in the centre with the town houses clustered around, and both are cradled within the crescent of surrounding hills. The architecture is rendered in considerable detail and the cityscape is depicted with the clear use of perspective. The pilgrims' road meanders into the desert beyond the mountains on the left. From comparisons with engravings of similar views, the present painting depcits the Holy City as it looked around the middle of the ninteenth century.