By birth a member of the wealthy, aristocratic, strongly Catholic families of Malta, Amadeo, Fifth Count Preziosi, was born in Malta on December 2, 1816, and baptised in the parish church of Porto Salvo in Valletta with the names of Aloysius, Rosarius, Amadeus, Raymondus and Andreas. His father preferred to call him Amadeo, probably as a tribute to King Amadeo of Sicily who ennobled the family in 1718.

His father, Count Giovanni Francesco Preziosi, expecting that his eldest son should play a significant part in the island’s new administrative system devised by the Governor, Sir Thomas Maitland,  sent Amadeo to the University of Malta from where he graduated in jurisprudence.

However, Amadeo considered himself old and rich enough to decide for himself the kind of life he was to live. Like his corsairing ancestors, he felt a natural urge for travel and adventure.

Both Amadeo and his brother Leandro were endowed with extraordinary talents, the latter particularly in photography, then a novelty in Europe. Amadeo was more inclined towards the traditional arts. He spent long hours practising caricature and perspective, and his art master, Giuseppe Hyzler, was often im­pressed by the accuracy and the ease with which he could sketch and draw faces.

Amadeo traveled to Paris around 1840 and there he continued to develop his artistic talents at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This period consolidated his philosophy of art. Although strongly influenced by the conventional art of his early master Hyzler, he was open to the ideas of young Parisian artists, who shared with him a neo-classical view of art. They brought him closer to the old artistic creed that the human person and all aspects of life were the source of artistic inspiration.

On his return to Malta, Preziosi found his father no less antagonistic to his artistic inclinations than before. Only by leaving the island could he hope to pursue his own choice of career, seeking elsewhere an environment that was more suitable to his tastes.

The place Preziosi selected for his ‘escape’ was Constantinople. Malta, in the middle of the Mediterranean, was visited by many travellers en route between western Europe and the Near East. Several of its indigenous artists found their way eastwards, and in particular to Constantinople. Among these were several members of the Schranz family.

Another Maltese artist active in Constantinople around this time was Luigi Brocktorff. If, as is likely, Preziosi knew something of the work of these artists, this may well have contributed to his decision to see Constantinople for himself.

It seems Preziosi arrived in Constantinople by November 1842. At about this time he may also have met Robert Curzon the private secretary to the British Ambassador, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, before he left on a special mission to Erzerum in January 1843. Curzon commissioned a series of drawings of typical Constantinople characters from Preziosi.

That year Preziosi also drew a portrait of Sir Henry Layard in Bakhtiyari dress, dated April 6, 1843. From all these commissions it is evident that Preziosi had rapidly established a reputation as a painter of Constantinople’s contemporary life. Living in Pera, in Hamalbasi Sokagi, with a Greek wife, Iphigenie Marchant, by whom he had three daughters and a son, he became a well-known figure.

Preziosi’s staple subjects were the ordinary inhabitants of Constantinople. In addition to Turks from all walks of life, there are, among other nationalities, Greeks, Albanians, Circassians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Jews, Kurds and Nubians. He became familiar with almost every aspects of its life, from the entourages of the foreign diplomats and other Christian inhabitants of Pera and Galata to the mainly Muslim population of Stamboul on the other side of the Golden Horn.

Preziosi supplied images of Constantinople’s life and scenery to countless travellers from the West for them to take home as souvenirs of their visit, much like picture postcards today

Several artists before Preziosi had depicted Constantinople characters, but these usually focussed on high-ranking members of the establishment and primarily for the sake of their exotic and colourful costume. By contrast, Preziosi’s are set in the context of their everyday existence: the barber is at work in his shop, towel and basin to hand; the Bulgarian shepherd tends to his flock; the odalisque reclines on the soft cushions of her harem apartment; the dervish counts his beads and meditates in a cemetery. It is as if the spectator has turned a corner and interrupted them in the course of their daily lives.

Preziosi supplied images of Constan­tinople’s life and scenery to countless travellers from the West for them to take home as souvenirs of their visit, much like picture postcards today. He was so well established that his own studio became one of Constantinople’s tourist attractions.

The popularity of Preziosi’s Constantinople ‘types’ prompted him to embark on a series of lithographs. These were published in 1858 by Lemercier, the foremost lithographic house in Paris in the mid-19th century. Preziosi pioneered a process that reproduced more faithfully both the gradation and density of tone of the original drawings.

The album, entitled Stamboul: Recol­lections of Eastern Life, consists of 29 plates and a frontispiece. Each plate encapsulates a slice of Constantinople life: women fingering the quality of silk materials in the bazaar; an old man serving pilau to a negro woman with her child; prosperous, well-dressed Greeks emerging from church, while beggars wait at the door; women picnicking at the Sweet Waters of Asia; a hamal bent under the weight of a tourist’s luggage, complete with umbrella, walking stick and top hat; a widow and her child in a cemetery; dervishes whirling in their tekke.

By using images instead of words to express his own appreciation of the Turkish character, Preziosi telescoped reality in order to impart as much information as possible about his subject. In the Coffee House, for example, are all the characters one might expect to find in a Turkish cafe, but crammed together to fill almost every inch of the picture space.

In all this, Preziosi’s lithographs are very different from his much more naturalistic watercolours of the people and places of Constantinople. In general, his subjects are members of the ordinary civilian population of Constantinople dressed in the traditional apparel of their race and class. His intentions in The Beauties of the Bosphorus were not only to record the traditional customs of the Turks, but also to capture the flavour of Constantinople and its environs before they disappeared.

Preziosi’s independent means enabled him to work for his own pleasure as well as for commercial gain, and it is possible that he put together this series for himself, collecting exotic individuals, much as a lepidopterist might collect rare and colourful butterflies. Roaming the streets and bazaars of the city he would have had ample opportunity to gather into his net all the various types of traders, artisans, tribesmen, religious devotees and travellers from all over the Ottoman Empire and beyond who were drawn to Constantinople by its wealth, fame and beauty.

At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, one finds a collection of 31 portraits by Preziosi of both men and women. Most of the characters whom Preziosi portrayed, many of them from remote regions where foreigners were unknown, would have been inherently suspicious if not hostile to having their likeness taken. Portraiture was a Western concept alien to most Orientals and especially Muslims, who regarded it as sinister and inviting the evil eye.

It is unlikely that Preziosi could have succeeded in this remarkable achievement if he had not been familiar with his subjects’ ways and customs, and to some extent, their common language. Without being able to communicate with them, he would not have been able to gain their confidence. His biographer, Gulserem Ramazangolu, claimed that throughout his life Preziosi “sincerely acted like a Turk and managed to be one of them”.

These, by any standards an exceptional group of portraits, are among Preziosi’s finest works. They reveal not only his acute observation of his sitters and his knowledge of their cultures, but also the rapidity and assurance with which he could draw. The forms are deftly outlined with pencil or pen and ink, and then given substance with broad sweeps of watercolour, sometimes thickened with bodycolour.

During the 1850s, a major international event – the Crimean War – invested his scenes of Constantinople life with even greater interest. The number of visitors, both military and civilian, rose enormously, and consequently the demand for pictorial mementoes of the scenery. Several of Preziosi’s landscapes at this time include evidence of the war – soldiers, the allied fleets anchored in the Bosphorus, or the Christian cemetery at Scutari.

Similar scenes, dated 1865, were purchased by the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), who visited Preziosi’s Pera studio on  April 8, 1869.

Although he continued to paint Constantinople scenes during the 1860s, Preziosi also spent some of this decade travelling. Constantinople was no longer a ‘focus of extraordinary interest’ to western Europeans and this may have contributed to his decision to widen his repertoire of subjects. In 1862 he accompanied H.C. du Bois, envoy extraordinary, from the Netherlands to the Ottoman court, and thence to Egypt.

In Cairo, Preziosi studied ordinary people, just as he had done in Constantinople, gathering material for a publication similar in kind to Stamboul. Entitled Souvenirs du Caire, its everyday life subjects include a street barber, dancing almahs, camel drivers, dervishes and Coptic women. Had it not been for Preziosi’s illustrations, the knowledge of certain ethic groups, today defunct, may have remained unknown to our civilisation.

During the summers of 1868 and 1869 he visited Romania, spending most of the time in Bucharest but also travelling through the countryside. It has been suggested that the two trips were undertaken at the behest of the new reigning Prince, Charles I, who may have been introduced to Preziosi on a visit to Constantinople in 1866, and who wanted a pictorial record of his State tours.

The Bucharest Fishmarket is one of the best pictures depicting Rumania. It represents the history of a people whose husbandry and hardship are not reflected in the wrinkles of men’s faces but in the vividness and intricacy of the designs on the women’s corsets.

As in his Constantinople scenes, his figures are not cardboard cutouts but full of vim and vigour. His skills in rendering the intricate decorative details of Romanian architecture are also seen here to great advantage. His landscapes are no mere backdrops, and he is as sensitive in his observation of atmospheric conditions as of the human character.

The Egyptian adventure played a decisive role on Preziosi’s humanitarian character. No sooner had he returned to Turkey than he sought to live in a place that was closer to those less fortunate than himself. So he moved to Yeşilköy, a quiet village on the outskirts of Constantinople. There he set up his new home in Hammalbagi Street, Beyoglu, where he established his permanent studio dedicating most of his time painting “the greatness of the Turks and the magnificence of their past”. He also became a court painter to the Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909).

On  September 27, 1882, while he was out hunting in the countryside of Yesilköy he mishandled his gun while passing it to his servant and the trigger went off accidentally, mortally wounding him.

The people attended his funeral in their thousands and many from all walks of life, including the representative of the Sultan and distinguished members of various diplomatic missions in Istanbul. They silently followed his cortege as it wound through the narrow street of Beyoglu to the Roman Catholic cemetery of San Stefano, Yesilköy, where he was buried.

The news of his tragic death reached Malta less than a week later.

In an obituary on the backpage of Il Risorgimento of  October 3, 1882, the popular Maltese artist Giuseppe Calì wrote: “The island of Malta has learned with deep sorrow that Chevalier Amadeo Preziosi was mortally wounded in Istambul on September 27, 1882, and died without regaining con­sciousness. The famous artist departed this life leaving three daughters (Mathilde, Giulia and Catherine) and his son (Roberto). We share the sorrow of his bereaved family and his beloved friends.”