Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat Ĭbrahim Pasa

The name in the title is a place. Nevşehirli means "from Nevşehir", and when İbrahim Pasha was born, around 1666, there was no Nevşehir. He came from Muşkara, a village in Cappadocia in central Anatolia. Once he became grand vizier in 1718, he had it rebuilt as a planned town and renamed it Nevşehir, the New City. At its centre he endowed a mosque, finished in 1726, with a religious college, a school, a library, a public kitchen and a bathhouse around it. The mosque still stands, and people still call it the Kurşunlu, the lead-covered one, after its dome.

Vanmour painted him in the late 1720s, when the pasha had been in office for about a decade. He stands full length in a white silk kaftan lined with sable. On his head is the kallâvî, the tall ceremonial turban by which viziers could be recognised, and behind him is the raised seat of the council hall where he presided.