François -Marie Rosset (1743-1824)

Turkish women from Mosul and (?) Nineveh, playing a game called Heyz (?) A Maronite doctor looks on, Drawing, wash signed lower left "Rosset F. 30.5 x 43.5 cm The same colorized drawing, with a few differences in the costumes, appears in the Cabinet des Estampes of the BnF with the caption: "Femme de Mossoul jouant avec une Grecque". It was intended for the collection "Moeurs et Coutumes turques et orientales dessinées dans le pays en 1790", by Rosset. An album of 85 folio-sized plates, drawn on thick paper and colored in soft tones: the first are related to Turkey, followed by costumes from Armenia, Palestine, Greece, Egypt and Persia, and finally landscape views. A pupil of his father, who took him to Paris to attend the Académie de peinture et de sculpture, and attached to the voyage of Abbé de Beauchamp, Grand Vicar of Babylon, from 1782 to 1790, François-Marie Rosset traveled throughout Western Asia, drawing costumes and oriental scenes. In 1797, when the Ecole Centrale du Jura was set up in Dole, he became a drawing teacher there and continued his duties at the secondary school that replaced it.