Luigi Mayer

Biography
1755 - 1803

About the artist

Luigi Mayer (1755–1803) was an Italian-German artist and one of the earliest and most important late 18th-century European painters of the Ottoman Empire.
Mayer was a close friend of Sir Robert Ainslie, 1st Baronet, a British ambassador to Turkey between 1776 and 1792, and the bulk of his paintings and drawings during this period were commissioned by Ainslie. He travelled extensively through the Ottoman Empire between 1776 and 1794, and became well known for his sketches and paintings of panoramic landscapes of ancient sites from the Balkans to the Greek Islands, Turkey and Egypt, particularly ancient monuments and the Nile. Many of the works were amassed in Ainslie's collection, which was later presented to the British Museum, providing a valuable insight into the Middle East of that period.

In or before 1788 Robert Ainslie, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, commissioned the Italian artist Luigi Mayer to travel with him and make drawings for him in Turkey, Greece and the Middle East, and Mayer continued there until 1794, three years after Ainslie's return. Mayer's views give us our best pre-Napoleonic images of many of the sites.
Views in Turkey in Europe and Asia (from 1801), by Sir Robert Ainslie, was a multi-volume work based on Mayer's drawings. There were plates engraved by William Watts. Thomas Milton was involved, producing aquatints of Egyptian views.

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