An Embassy Building in Pera

Since 1612, when Cornelis Haga arrived as the first Dutch envoy to the Ottoman court, the Dutch mission in Istanbul has stood on the same hill in Pera, the quarter across the Golden Horn where the European embassies were. This canvas shows the building as it looked in the 18th century, with a formal garden of trees and flower beds laid out in front. The Rijksmuseum explains how such embassies were built. A stone ground floor held the servants, and above it a timber upper storey contained the rooms where the ambassador received his guests.

The timber was the weak point. Istanbul's great fires took the embassy more than once, among them the fire of 1767, and in the 1850s it was rebuilt in stone. That building, the Palais de Hollande, still stands on the site and houses the Dutch consulate general. The museum gives this view to Jean Baptiste Vanmour's workshop and dates it only broadly, between about 1720 and 1744.