Amedeo Preziosi

Biography

Preziosi’s earliest surviving drawings of Istanbul are dated November 1842. When exactly he left Malta is not known: the date is placed somewhere between 1840 and 1842.

He was born on 2 December 1816 in Valletta, into a noble family. His father, Giovanni Francesco Preziosi, held high office in the local administration and in 1802 represented the Maltese at the negotiations that ended in the Treaty of Amiens. His mother, Margareta Reynaud, was French. Amedeo was the first child of the family and was given a long string of names at baptism: Aloysius-Rosarius-Amadeus-Raymundus-Andreas. His younger brother Leandro later became one of the first photographers in Malta. Amedeo began to draw early and studied with Giuseppe Hyzler, a painter well regarded on the island. His father saw him as a lawyer and sent him to Paris to study law at the Sorbonne, but Amedeo turned to the study of painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. Back in Malta, he found no suitable environment for an artist there, and his father disapproved of his choice. Fellow artists in Paris spoke highly of the Near East, and Preziosi went there.

In 1844 Robert Curzon, private secretary to the British ambassador in Istanbul, Lord Stratford Canning, commissioned an album from him, “Costumes of Constantinople”. It is now in the British Museum. Photography was only beginning then, and Preziosi sold European tourists and visitors views of Istanbul and its surroundings. In 1858 he published his most popular works as lithographs at the Lemercier workshop in Paris. The chromolithograph album “Stamboul, Recollections of Eastern Life”, reissued in 1861 as “Stamboul, Souvenir d’Orient”, was drawn by Preziosi himself on the lithographic stone. A second album followed later, “Souvenir du Caïre”, with drawings from a trip to Egypt.

He married a Greek woman from Istanbul, and they had four children: Mathilde, Giulia, Catherine and Roberto. At first the family lived in Pera, on Hamalbaşı Street, and later moved to the quiet village of San Stefano (now Yeşilköy). Preziosi served as deputy dragoman (interpreter) at the British embassy and as first dragoman of the Greek legation. Sources differ about the languages he spoke: according to some, his mother tongue was Italian and he certainly knew French; according to others, he spoke Greek, Turkish and English fluently.

Tourists who wanted to take home a memory of Istanbul came to his studio. In April 1869 his visitors included the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who bought several watercolours from him. As early as 1866 the new Prince of Romania, Carol I, had visited Istanbul, met Preziosi and invited him to his country to paint landscapes and portraits of its people. The artist arrived in Romania in June 1868. He drew scenes in Bucharest and elsewhere, among them several showing the prince himself. The sketches were later turned into watercolours in his Istanbul studio, and the prince bought them. From 30 May to 15 July 1869 Preziosi was in Romania again. His drawings in pencil, ink and watercolour from this trip are collected in the sketchbook “La Valachie par Preziosi”, which is kept in the Municipal Museum in Bucharest.

Little is known of his last years. Preziosi went on working in Istanbul, but as photography spread, his watercolours earned less and less: from a single photograph an unlimited number of cheap copies could be made.

He was killed in an accidental gun discharge while hunting on 27 September 1882 and was buried in the Catholic cemetery at Yeşilköy. His work lay forgotten for decades. It was shown again in Bucharest in 1934, an exhibition devoted to him was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1985, and in 2003 the Museum of Bucharest organised another.