Camels have continued to feature in paintings showing more recent times, from events at the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon was in Egypt.

Jean-Léon Gérôme made several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt from 1867. The French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had been in 1798-1801, so this was still relatively recent history, even when viewed from the distance of the final years of the Second Empire.

Dromedaries were introduced to Australia in the nineteenth century to carry people and loads through its arid regions. They came to prominence in the ill-fated Burke and Wills Expedition of 1860 to cross the continent of Australia from south (Melbourne) to north in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Nicholas Chevalier painted this Memorandum of the Start of the Exploring Expedition to mark the occasion in 1860. The team left Royal Park, Melbourne on the afternoon of 20 August 1860 with nineteen men and about twenty tonnes of equipment and stores. Included were more than twenty-four camels, horses and wagons. Only one of the team survived to complete the crossing, and seven died, including both Burke and Wills.

David Roberts’ painting of the Isle of Graia, Gulf of Akabah (1839), shown here as a lithograph, is unusual for showing camels on the beach. We’re used to seeing dogs, horses, donkeys, even cows and sheep, but the ‘ship of the desert’ isn’t a common sight on the beach. The coastline of the Gulf of Aqaba (or Gulf of Eilat) is on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, and before urbanisation, development, and the advent of tourists, had a wild desert beauty, as shown here.

As artists visited North Africa more during the latter half of the nineteenth century, paintings of camels in their natural habitat became more common.

Marià Fortuny’s Camels Reposing, Tangiers (1865) is a watercolour sketch made over a heavily-worked and now visible graphite drawing, showing a group of camels resting near the city of Tangier, not far from Tétouan, in northern Morocco.

Alberto Pasini’s painting of The Caravan of the Shah of Persia from 1867 is a superbly wide view of an extensive royal caravan crossing a desert plain, including a couple of elephants at the right.

When Ivan Aivazovsky visited Tiflis, now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia in 1868, his superb painting of this cosmopolitan city shows camels on its bustling streets.

Even in 1900-18, when Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani painted this Tatar Camel Driver, they would still have been a common sight in parts of Tbilisi visited by traders from the south, and the artist was clearly familiar with the animal. Tatar traders moved their goods on Bactrian camels as far as Crimea and other parts of southern Ukraine.

Eugen Bracht’s paintings of the Middle East avoid the crowded and bustling towns, preferring the barren desert where just a handful of people travel with their camels In the Arabian Desert (1882).

Bracht’s slightly later view From the Sinai Desert (1884) shows more groups on the move in the relentless heat. The ship of the desert indeed, but never argue with a half-ton camel, even if it’s an entry in a beauty pageant.

In the first of these two collections of paintings of the city of Istanbul and its surroundings, I looked a little at its history, then views painted by European visitors during the nineteenth century, reaching the work of the Italian artist Alberto Pasini and his signature green melons.

In 1882, Pasini painted this view By the Fountain, Constantinople combining a small market, with its melon seller of course, and three horses sheltering as well as they can from the blazing midday sun.

Seven years later, Pasini painted A Market Scene showing an eclectic mixture of produce, ranging from live chickens to pots and the ever-present melons. To the left of centre is a ramshackle horse-drawn carriage.

A Mosque (1886) is the second of Pasini’s two paintings in the Met, and a marked contrast from the earlier one. There are no smart carriages here, and most of the exterior of the building is in need of decoration if not repair. But there’s a small market running, and you can still get melons too, as shown in the detail below.

The great Swedish artist Anders Zorn visited Turkey in 1886.

One portrait he completed before leaving the country is this Bedouin Girl (1886) he saw in Constantinople.

Although little-known outside Turkey, one of its pioneering artists was Osman Hamdi Bey, a senior administrator in the late years of the Ottoman Empire, and its first modern archaeologist. The son of a Grand Vizier, he travelled to Paris in 1860 to study law but changed to become a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger.

The wonderful assortment of characters in Osman Hamdi’s panoramic view of a Persian Carpet Dealer on the Street (1888) reflects the cosmopolitan population of Istanbul, sitting at the gateway between Europe and Asia Minor.

Another familiar street scene of the day, Osman Hamdi’s Public Scribe (1910) may have been part of a campaign to improve education and literacy, particularly among women.

Osman Hamdi’s magnificent Tortoise Trainer from 1906 is by far his best-known painting, and set the record for the highest price paid for a Turkish painting when it was sold in 2004 for $3.5 million.

Its ingenious allegory can be read in at least two ways. The artist may have been self-critical of his painstakingly slow work; tortoises are not only inherently slow, but in the early eighteenth century had been used in Istanbul to bear lit candles for evening outings. This painting also had a greater political meaning, as the tortoise trainer wears traditional Ottoman religious costume from before the middle of the nineteenth century, and is training the tortoises with a traditional Turkish ney flute.

In that sense, it’s a satire on the slow, faltering, and often ineffective reforms made to the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth century, an issue with which Osman Hamdi had much personal experience. This resulted in a time of increasing social and political upheaval, preceding the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 which changed the basis of rule in the empire, followed by the breakup of the empire after the First World War.

Michael Zeno Diemer’s brilliant painting of The Ahırkapı Lighthouse (1906-07) shows one of the oldest tower lighthouses at one of the most notable coastal landmarks: the southern entrance to the Straits of Bosporus, to the south of Istanbul. This lighthouse is on the European side; its opposite number is the Kadıköy İnciburnu lighthouse to the east, which would be off the right edge of this painting.

In late March 1907 Paul Signac travelled with the painter Henri Person (1876-1926) to Constantinople, where they painted for six weeks before returning to France. This is the only accessible finished painting from Signac’s visit to what’s known in French as La Corne d’Or, or The Golden Horn, (1907). Using the same compositional technique that had proved so successful in his views of Venice, this shows the Süleymaniye Mosque on the Third Hill from the north-west, on the western (European) side of the Bosporus Strait.

In the foreground are brightly coloured rowing boats taking part in what looks like a regatta, and a row of sailing ships on moorings, all in the waters of the Golden Horn. The mosque is relatively desaturated as it dissolves into the distant pink and gold sky. This mosque was built between 1550-57 for Suleiman the Magnificent, and encloses the mausoleums of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and his wife. It’s one of the best-known sights in the city of Istanbul, and an ideal view for Signac’s treatment.

At that point, bathed in Signac’s colour and light, I’m afraid it’s time to cross the Bosporus and return to Europe.

There can be few cities in the world as exciting as Istanbul, as it straddles the Bosporus Strait joining Europe to Asia, and connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. This weekend I invite you to join me in seeing that city, and a little of the country around it, in the paintings of great artists.

Founded as the Greek city of Byzantium at around the time of Homer, it grew into the capital of Constantine the Great’s Roman Empire in 330 CE, and was soon renamed Constantinople. It then served as the capital of a succession of Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and was finally renamed Istanbul in 1930.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1885 painting of The Great Bath of Bursa is an intricate orientalist fantasy set in this large city in north-western Turkey, which for a period during the fourteenth century was the country’s capital. This is to the south of Istanbul, close to the Sea of Marmara.

Legends about Charlemagne and his travels are often colourful, but usually unsupported by evidence. This miniature showing Charlemagne in Constantinople from about 1450 appears entirely fictitious, and another fantasy.

Eugène Delacroix’s major entry for the Salon of 1841 was The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1840), destined for display in the Salle de Croisades in Versailles. This shows an episode from the fourth crusade in 1204, in which the crusaders took Constantinople. French forces were under the command of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, and had attacked from the land, while Venetians attacked the port from the sea. Its reception was as muted as its colours.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, European artists started travelling to Turkey to paint its exotic sights.

Richard Dadd’s Caravanserai at Mylasa in Asia Minor (1845) is a fairly conventional ‘orientalist’ view of a group of travellers at what had been the ancient Greek city of Mylasa, now Milas in south-western Turkey, well to the south of Istanbul and on the Mediterranean coast.

View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus (1856) is one of many views that Ivan Aivazovsky made of this great city, which he visited on many occasions. The artist kept his studio in Crimea, on the northern shore of the Black Sea.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Italian painter Alberto Pasini lived in Constantinople for periods of up to nine months, and painted the city and its surroundings frequently.

Pasini’s great forte, if his surviving paintings are anything to go by, was the marketplace. He became very familiar with the often ad hoc markets set up wherever trading vessels came alongside. Market in Istanbul (Constantinople) from 1868 captures the cosmopolitan nature of these markets, and the whole city, mixing cultures, beliefs, eras, and technologies so gloriously.

Despite their apparent detail, Pasini’s paintings are relatively small, none here exceeding 90 cm (36 inches) in either dimension. The Met’s painting of A Mosque from 1872 is one of his larger works, and appears a more formal composition. A high-ranking person has just arrived in their decorated carriage to attend this mosque (see detail below), where they are greeted by a very casually turned-out guard, at the left. In the right foreground is one of Pasini’s signature melon sellers, who appear in so many of his paintings.

At The Golden Horn from about 1876 shows a dockside not far from the bustling city of Istanbul. The Golden Horn (in Modern Turkish, Haliç) is a horn-shaped estuary emptying into the Bosporus Strait at ‘Old Istanbul’. As a stretch of sheltered water so close to the city, it had long been a popular port for smaller traders, such as the mixed steam and sailing ship seen shrouded in coal smoke.

Market Day in Constantinople (1877) is one of Pasini’s finest paintings of the city’s waterfront, and one of several which have made their way to the US. Although its cultural fusion is less overt than his earlier painting of a market there, this is another ‘big’ view as its quay sweeps gently away into the distance. The detail below shows how meticulous Pasini is in his closer figures and produce, including the inevitable melon sellers with their great green globes glistening in the sunshine.