Le Turc amoureux

Mavi Boncuk |Le Turc amoureux / Nicolas Lancret[1] 


British Museum has a similar Engraving (image reversed). A man dressed in Turkish costume carrying a guitar standing in a landscape; after Lancret. 1736. Lettered with production and publication details, title and five lines of poetry in French. Published by Nicolas de Larmessin III, Print made by Georg Friedrich Schmidt 1776. 

"The influence of the music of the Ottoman Empire on western music is most obvious in the use and adaptation of Turkish percussion instruments in European orchestras. Here one thinks above all of the triangle, Turkish crescent, cymbals and bass drum. In addition, 18th-century European composers used stylistic features of Ottoman military bands in their own music. Although "janissary music", as these Turkish percussion ensembles were called, was still capable of making an impressively warlike, military noise, the former picture of the Turks as threatening and bloodthirsty had changed completely: in countless novels, plays, operas, paintings and dainty porcelain figurines we find stylized figures such as the infatuated Turk of Nicolas Lancret's painting Le turc amoureux and gallant and generous Turks, as in "Le turc généreux" from Rameau's Les Indes galantes. All of them served as a mirror for courtly and middle-class Europe." Vladimir Ivanoff 


SOURCE

Curator's comments After a painting which, according to Bocher, was in the collection of 'M. le Comte de La Béraudière'; pair with 'La Belle Grecque'


 [1] Nicolas Lancret (22 January 1690 – 14 September 1743), French painter, was born in Paris, and became a brilliant depicter of light comedy which reflected the tastes and manners of French society under the regent Orleans.