Workshop of Jean Baptiste Vanmour

A soldier stands full length before a stone wall, one hand resting on the barrel of his musket. On the back someone wrote Arbanes, and below it, in Dutch, an Albanian soldier. The number 27 is painted in a lower corner. The canvas is only about 39 centimetres high, one of the small costume figures among the pictures owned by Cornelis Calkoen, the Dutch ambassador in Istanbul.

Workshop of reflects how such pictures were made. Jean Baptiste Vanmour lived in Istanbul for nearly 40 years, and western visitors wanted figures of the city's peoples in their dress, from dervishes to Greek women to Albanian soldiers. He met the demand with assistants, who repeated types he had worked out, and the Rijksmuseum assigns this soldier to his studio, as it does other small figures in the group, among them a dervish.

The museum dates the canvas only broadly, between 1700 and Vanmour's death in 1737.