Leander's Tower on the Bosporus

In this view of the Bosporus, the strait that forms the boundary between Europe and Asia, Gifford applies the atmospheric, luminist style of his Hudson River School landscapes to a well-known vista in the Near East. Western tourists counted the Bosporus and Leander’s Tower, the lighthouse that rises above the water on the left side of the painting, among Turkey’s major attractions. Echoing other period accounts, Gifford described the harbor as the “vision of a fairy land . . .the towers and domes and minarets, glittering and golden in the early sun.” Gifford visited and sketched the Bosporus while traveling through the Near East in 1869. Like many nineteenth-century American painters, he journeyed abroad to capitalize on the growing interest in “oriental” subjects. In the 1870s, he completed multiple paintings of Turkey and Egypt based on sketches from his trip.