Preziosi, Amadeo.

The view shows at its centre the Selimiye barracks, initially built in wood by Sultan Selim III in 1800, but rebuilt in stone 1825-28, to which seven storey towers were added to each corner in 1849. In the Crimean war the barracks were used by the British, who converted them into a military hospital. On 4 November 1854 Florence Nightingale arrived with thirty eight nurses to treat the wounded and those suffering from cholera. This watercolour is dated just five weeks later, 12th December 1854, and shows in the foreground soldiers in the burial ground known as the Hydarpasha cemetery, given by the Turks to the British in 1855.