Ettore Simonetti (Italian, 1857-1909)

The Italian Orientalists specializing in watercolor all worked in close proximity to one another on the Via Margutta in Rome. The group included Giuseppe Aureli, Giulo Rosati, Enrico Tarenghi and Ettore Simonetti.
Simonetti was a highly accomplished watercolourist, who created compositions from a mixture of photographs, props and his own imagination, often varying the same composition or executing the same composition in two different mediums. Indeed, a similar composition of this painting was sold on behalf of the Dallas Museum of Art in Christie’s New York in 2003.