It is perhaps fitting that the Venetian romancer Giacomo Casanova (d. 1798) visited Istanbul in 1745, when erotic imagery and sensuality enjoyed a new visible presence in urban life. Around the same time, the Ottoman artist Abdullah Buhari was actively creating a growing corpus of paintings that explicitly captured stylish characters from Istanbul’s demi monde in moments of sexual encounter. In this painting, he depicts a richly dressed couple engaged in a tryst over a glass of wine. Set on a decontextualized ground, it is impossible to discern whether this scene represents a truly romantic encounter or a transaction between a courtesan and client at a high-class brothel. At the top right corner in red ink, the artist signs and dates his work. The borders of marbled paper suggest that this painting likely once resided in an album, akin to other codices that preserve his character studies.

Unlike the idealized beauties that dominated paintings for most of the seventeenth century, Abdullah Bukhari’s works offer glimpses of seemingly realistic encounters plucked from the urban sphere. As with many of his paintings of couples in coitus, the figures appear largely dressed, with robes pooling around them to reveal the layers of sumptuous textiles that comprised each outfit. The illuminated flask of wine in the background and the shared cup also suggest that the individuals portrayed had access to higher end works of brass or gilt copper. Thus, just as significant as the scene playing out, the artist’s preservation of precious material details aid in placing this moment within a wealthy urbanite setting, likely familiar to the painting’s original consumers.

Abdullah’s sobriquet of Bukhari/Buhari (lit. “of Bukhara”) indicates the artist either once resided in the city (now in modern-day Uzbekistan) or had other close ties to the region, which may explain his especially distinct style among painters in Istanbul during the eighteenth century. Abdullah’s figures tend to sport rather detached expressions, almost at odds with the rest of the scene. His artistic activities coincide with an increasing appetite for erotic painting in the Ottoman empire that began at the end of the seventeenth century and continued into the early nineteenth century. Though Abdullah Bukhari is best known for his single-folio works, his hand also appears in the equally bawdy paintings of Atayi’s Khamsa (Quintet), which was illustrated numerous times in the eighteenth century to reflect contemporaneous Ottoman urban life. Some scholars have likewise suggested that the artist used real-life models for his single-folio studies. Yet comparisons across his works reveal that he often incorporated stock models that were repeated across several character studies.