A Greek Priest

On the back of this canvas someone wrote Pape Grec in French and, below it in Dutch, a Greek cleric or priest. Papas was the everyday name in the Ottoman world for a Greek Orthodox priest, and Istanbul had a great many of them. The city was the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, the senior bishop of the Orthodox Church, who resided in the Phanar quarter on the Golden Horn.

The priest stands full length beside a doorway with a column, one figure chosen to stand for a whole community. Western Europe already knew figures like him from a book of 100 engravings after paintings by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, published in Paris in 1714, in which Greeks, Armenians and Albanians appear alongside Turks.