The little we know of Giuseppe Schranz’s early years comes from a February 5, 1803 entry in the baptismal register of Mahón, capital of the Spanish island of Menorca, and a June 6, 1818 Mahón passport register entry: his mother Isabella obtained a passport to leave Menorca for Malta, her husband Anton having moved there a year earlier. That Giuseppe and other siblings were on her passport would be most unremarkable, but for two other factors:

Firstly, Giuseppe’s elder brothers’ names, Giovanni and Antonio, are not in that passport register entry. Giovanni, then 23, would have probably obtained a separate passport. Antonio was only 17, however – he could only have featured on his mother’s passport. Nor are their names registered separately. How does Giuseppe come into that picture, however?

Secondly, the register provides a second (tenuous) pointer. The family reached Malta on July 17 after five days at sea, meaning they left on July 12; on July 6, however, five days before their departure, Isabella requested a second passport – for Giuseppe.

Could it be that Giovanni and Antonio, then in the flower of their youth, resisted the move, possibly tied by relationships to their island home, fired perhaps by Romanticism’s revolutionary spirit spreading throughout Spain against Ferdinand VII’s growingly vicious rule? Was Giuseppe, then 15, also reluctant to leave, desiring instead to stay with his elder brothers – had there been some defacement of the original passport, perhaps? One will never know.

Giuseppe Schranz first left Malta in June 1826, when only 23. He had previously obtained another passport, in February 1825, having just turned 22. It was issued to “Giuseppe Schrans [sic], a denizen of this island”; ‘denizen’ denotes a foreigner allowed certain rights in an adopted country. Whether he did use the passport is a question: no shipping registers record him leaving or arriving.

He next travelled to the Greek island of Zante in October 1828; the brothers often travelled together, so with Giovanni returning from Zante in September 1830, with no other passport issued to Giuseppe, and with shipping registers only recording an 1844 departure of his, Giuseppe’s absence may have been long… although some watercolours, signed “Schranz, Malta”, do exist. Three interesting ones show Mosta Dome under construction, Wardija Ridge from Xemxija and St Paul’s Islands from Wignacourt Tower (a pair).

This undocumented period must not be taken to indicate that he spent many years in Malta between 1828 and 1844 – indeed, the opposite is the case: Le Journal de Constantinople of June 24, 1852, reports that “Mr Schranz, a distinguished artist, has lived in Constantinople for 16 years”, meaning from about 1836. Some indicators suggest it was earlier. In any case, he settled in Istanbul and spent most of his life there. Where, however, was he in the eight years between 1828 and 1836?

The word ‘denizen’ may be a key. The bro­thers’ wanderlust suggests they did not develop a sense of belonging to the Maltese ambience. Uprooted from their island home, they found themselves in another island – half Menorca’s size, drier, with twice its population, speaking a Semitic language as well as Italian and English but not their native Spanish… and after seven years still labelled ‘denizens’ – foreigners.

Giovanni’s 1833 marriage to Concetta Scolaro (and their nine children) quelled his urge to travel, but Antonio’s and Giuseppe’s reluctance to leave Menorca appears to have become a reluctance to remain in Malta, an urge to be constantly on the move, stateless. Such transitoriness is not alien in art.

In Antonio, this became endless (and restless) mobility, along Africa’s northern coast, southern Italy, Greece and its islands and the Middle East: Palestine, Jordan, Arabia Petraea, Persia, Lebanon, Syria and most of Turkey, right up to Istanbul.

The Gathering of the Fleets by Giuseppe Schranz, oil on canvas, 87.5 x 132.5cm. Again, this is the theme of the great lithograph and, necessarily, similar to it.

In Giuseppe Schranz, it took another guise: he chose a new base and settled there: elsewhere. Constantinople, then the Ottoman Empire’s vibrant heart, was a lure to Europeans, a very important political node for the European powers eager to stem Russia’s political and territorial aspirations, eventually culminating tragically in the 1850s Crimean War.

Turkish books and newspapers of the period, cited by later Turkish scholars, suggest 1832 for his Istanbul arrival. Four post-Zante years (1828-32) would explain Giuseppe’s many beautiful watercolours of mainland Greece, including Athens, and his fine oil of Corfu’s Esplanada, which reveals a greater maturity than that which some writers would imply by proposing that Giuseppe painted it in his brief 1826 visit, when he was only 23.

Proceeding from Greece to Turkey, he eventually settled in Constantinople; Selim Satı Paşa, director of the Military Academy of Art, when recruiting Giuseppe Schranz for a teaching post at the academy in 1838, is quoted as having written: “The renowned and ingenious Spanish painter, Mösyö Şirans [Monsieur Schranz], was appointed to the Professorship of Drawing”, adding that “he is skilled in pencil drawings, watercolours, and landscape pictures”. Notable in the director’s comment is the word “Spanish”, strengthening our reading of the brothers’ ties to their birthplace, Menorca.

Giuseppe’s strong affinity with his chosen base is manifest: an entry in the registers at St Paul’s Shipwreck parish, Valletta, dated August 30, 1839, records the baptism of Giovanni’s second son. Giuseppe, godfather by proxy, is described as “resident in Constantinopolim” – and the child’s first name is “Constantinus”. That he did not come to Malta for this event may be attributed to his teaching pressures; neither did he return three months later, in December 1839, with his brother Antonio, when their father, Anton, was on his deathbed. Antonio, who probably was with Giuseppe (an oil painting’s verso is inscribed “Constantinopoli, A. Schranz 1839”), returned to Malta on December 4.

Articles in Le Journal de Constantinople provide insights into his activities. The July 14, 1849, issue reports a first exhibition by the Military Academy of Art students, presented by Pierre Guès and Giu­seppe Schranz, both artist colleagues teaching there. The works in the watercolours section were by Giuseppe’s students; they were praised for being so fine as to have been presented to the Sultan.

Several are the known pencil and graphite drawings, lithographs and watercolours that Giuseppe Schranz made in Istanbul. Considering how long he lived there, however – at least 32 years, probably more – they are few. The reason may be the four-year teaching programme’s demands of his academy professorship.

The June 14, 1852, issue of Le Journal pays tribute to Giuseppe’s art, reporting in detail the publication of his first two lithograph panoramas of the Bosphorus, printed at the lithographic establishment of Jacomme & Cie, r. de Lancry, 12, Paris; the renowned Léon Jean-Baptiste Sabatier transferred on stone Giuseppe’s exquisite pencil drawings of the Bosphorus’s north and south coasts, each 31 kilometres long. In drawings of uncannily precise detail and superb, astonishingly fine delicacy, Giuseppe captured each coast on four sheets of paper, condensing eight kilometres of coastline into each 30cm-wide sheet. Each set of four sheets was then fixed into a unified whole measuring over 120cm, representing one coastline – a stunning feat, causing a great stir in 1852 and still much sought after today by collectors.

Le Journal lauds this “veritable masterpiece” – “All artists who up to now tried to reproduce on canvas or paper the wonderful spectacle the Bosphorus regales us with, limit themselves to fragmentary views. Mr Schranz, a distinguished artist now in his 16th year in Constantinople, had the unique and felicitous idea of depicting in pencil the Bosphorus’ magnificent panoramas”. The article adds: “the publication was personally presented to His Imperial Highness the Sultan.”

View of the Bosphorus from Above Scutari, 24.6 x 44cm, watercolour on paper. Rodney Searight gives a possible attribution to Margerita Schranz, who visited her brother Giuseppe in Istanbul twice, in 1836/7 and 1838/41.

The venture’s success was such that in 1853, Giuseppe (now also publisher together with A. Percheron, Constantinople), in collaboration with lithographers Leon Sabatier and Terry, published another set, printed by Jacomme & Cie, Paris. These panoramas are slightly smaller, while some single plates of popular views were added – ‘popular’ because the lure of the Orient was drawing throngs of visitors to the growingly cosmopolitan Ottoman ‘Porte’, and also because the European powers were courting Turkey to curb Russia’s advances. So popular were Giuseppe’s works that this set was soon republished, with additional material, by Frick Frères, Paris, some as colour lithographs.

Another impressive lithograph measuring 1m by 1.3m shows the Allied fleets at anchor in the Bosphorus. Printed in Paris and published by Schranz and Percheron in Constantinople, with Bayot and Sabatier as lithographers, this work has an interesting story.

Maltese painter Count Amadeo Preziosi settled in Istanbul in 1842, years after Giuseppe. In 1853, before the Crimean War broke out, the British ambassador to Turkey commissioned Preziosi to paint two large watercolours of the Allied forces converging in Constantinople in preparation for war. One watercolour, The Allied Fleets at Anchor in the Bosphorus, presents the assembled fleets. Giuseppe promptly published his great lithograph, dated “November 1853”, the date the fleets assembled, and bearing a bilingual title, Mouillage des Flottes Anglo-Françaises, Turque et Égyptienne dans le Bosphore/Anchorage of the English-French, Turkish & Egyptian Fleets in the Bosphorus. The lithograph presents a counter viewpoint to Preziosi’s.

Giuseppe goes one further – he produces a superb oil painting of the same scene, one of the few oils known by him, larger than the lithograph, in impressively fine detail, as with all his opuses. It is as if, in reply to Preziosi, he manifested his multiple skills in a clear statement of quality: an impressive lithograph for public acclaim and a fine oil as a seal of mastery. A number of exquisite pencil drawings and watercolours at the Topkapi Museum evidence his mastery and recognition – their being at the Topkapi means they were acquired by the Sultan.

Le Marchand de Bonbons, 47 x 26.5cm – Giuseppe Schranz’s watercolour as developed into a coloured lithograph by Adolphe Bayot, published with the Frick Frères album of The Bosphoros, 1853.

An observation by Briony Llewellyn (to whom the present writer is indebted for much information on Giuseppe’s work) fires our interest: the viewpoint of a Topkapi watercolour panorama is similar to Giuseppe’s lithograph and oil renderings of the anchored fleets: he thus executed that significant event in four media: lithograph, pencil, watercolour and oil.

Notwithstanding all this acclaim, however, we know so little of Giuseppe – not where his home was, nor his studio, neither why his sisters and mother often visited him, once for 18 months, once for three years – were they helping him, did he have a family perhaps, were they also artists, maybe? Margherita may have been; Rodney Searight suggests it, and her obituary says she was a lady of means, although she was not married.

Neither do we know where or when he died. We last hear of him in 1862, when he and Guès awarded their student, Süleyman Seyyid Bey (later a well-known artist and an academy professor) a distinction that procured him a long scholarship in Paris.

By default, we can assume he died before 1884: that year, artist Yusuf Franko Kusa began compiling his extraordinary album of caricatures of Istanbul’s artistic community – Giuseppe is not in it.

Often held as perhaps the best Schranz artist, Giuseppe remains the only one of whom all trace has been lost.

Mosta Dome Under Construction, watercolour on paper. Signed Schranz, Malta.