Nasli Playing the Guitar

Nasli Playing the Guitar is an oil painting created by Greek-French painter Théodore Jacques Ralli. Ralli was born and raised in Constantinople, which was part of the Ottoman Empire. In his early life, the painter was exposed to orientalist clothing, carpets, coffee shops, bazaars, and daily life in the Empire. Ralli was a member of the prominent Greek merchant family known as the Ralli Brothers, eventually settling in London to work for the family. Ralli traveled to Paris, France, in 1873 to study painting under Jean-Léon Gérôme at his workshop at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Ralli was infactuated with Cairo, Egypt, because of a painting he saw of Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ at an exhibition around the same period. The painting featured Cairo and was called The Bearers of Bad News. Both Gérôme and Lecomte du Nouÿ were orientalist painters featuring subjects from Cairo. Ralli traveled to Cairo in 1880, eventually opening a studio and organizing a Paris Salon-like exhibition in the 1890s called the Cairo Salon. Ralli painted odalisques, bashi bazouks, eunuchs, Arab soldiers, bedouins, camels, Arabs, mosques, harems, belly dancers, snake charmers, Jewish subjects, and Turkish baths.

Paris, France, was considered a fashionable city in the late 1800s. Orientalism was a unique phenomenon among artistic socialites. The style offered insight into the world of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, often displaying a world foreign to the people of the French Capital. French art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary popularized the term Orientalism in the 19th century, denoting subjects influenced by artists' travels to Western Asia. By 1893, Ralli's teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme was the honorary president of the French Society of Orientalist Painters, founded in 1893. Gérôme heavily influenced Ralli's orientalist works.

Gérôme studied under the orientalist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Gérôme traveled to Egypt for the first time in 1856, and two years later, he completed The Lute Player, which was set in Cairo, Egypt. The work features an arnaut playing a lute. One of Ralli's earliest orientalist works, Nasli Playing the Guitar was completed in 1877, emulating The Lute Player. Ralli completed another work featuring a lute player in 1881 called Serenade in Cairo. Other works featuring similar instruments include: Ferdinand Max Bredt's Serenade in Harem and Paul Le Thimmonier's Odalisque (Haremsdame) completed between 1875 and 1896. Some media list Nasli as a slave girl in a harem. In his orientalist paintings, Ralli sought to share the realism of everyday life throughout orientalist communities. The work has a rich exhibition history during its early period and was sold in 2006 at a Sotheby's auction in London.