ALBERTO PASINI (1826, Busseto - 1899, Cavoretto). "Street market". Oil on canvas. Signed in the lower right corner. Size: 44 x 29 cm, 67 x 52 cm (frame). Alberto Pasini was an Italian painter. He is best known for depicting Orientalist themes in a late Romantic style. After the death of his father in 1828, he and his mother moved to Parma, where Pasini enrolled, at the age of 17, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma. He studied landscape painting and drawing. In Parma, he was assisted by his uncle, the painter and manuscript illuminator Antonio Pasini, who painted for the local nobility and collaborated with the publishing house established by Giovanni Battista Bodoni. In 1852, he exhibited a series of thirty designs, converted into lithographs, depicting various castles around Piacenza, Lunigiana and Parma. He was noticed by the artist Paolo Toschi, who encouraged Pasini to travel to Paris, where Pasini first joined the workshop of Pierre-Luc-Charles and Eugène Cicéri, of the Barbizon School. In 1853, his lithograph of The Night won him entry into the Paris Salon and the workshop of the famous Théodore Chassériau. The outbreak of the Crimean War offered a new opportunity, when in February 1855 the latter painter recommended Pasini to replace him in the entourage of the French minister plenipotentiary Nicolas Prosper Bourée to Persia. Pasini accompanied him, returning through northern Persia and Armenia before reaching the port of Trebizond. On subsequent trips he visited Egypt, the Red Sea, Arabia, Istanbul and Persia. Pasini made use of his exhibitions during this trip in numerous highly detailed paintings of Orientalist themes. He left again for Istanbul in October 1867, summoned by the French ambassador Bourée. He returned to Turkey in 1876 to execute the four paintings commissioned by Sultan Abdul Aziz. He was about to return to Istanbul the following year when his patron, the Sultan, died. In 1865, he spent some time in Cannes, painting landscapes of the Côte d Azur. During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, he returned to Italy, settling in Cavoretto, in the hills around Turin. He continued to travel, closer to home, with trips to Venice and two stays in Spain in 1879 and 1883. He died in Cavoretto in 1899.