An Usher, Plate from The Costume of Turkey, 1802

A large-format color plate titled An Usher, drawn by Octavian Dalvimart and worked by Thomas Dadley, published on January 1, 1802 by William Miller of Old Bond Street, London, as part of The Costume of Turkey, an early nineteenth-century folio devoted to Ottoman dress and hierarchy, containing sixty plates after Dalvimart's drawings.

The subject is an Ottoman usher, a court functionary central to palace protocol. His costume is recorded in detail: a boldly striped kaftan, voluminous red trousers, prominent belt medallions, and the ceremonial staff of his office.

The seller describes the plate as a true stone lithograph with chromolithographic coloration rather than hand coloring, each color laid from its own stone in registration; the close-up image is offered as evidence of that layering. Dalvimart traveled widely through Ottoman territories in the late eighteenth century under British patronage, and his plates remain among the earliest systematic European records of Ottoman dress and ceremony.

Printed on medium-weight india wove paper, sheet approximately 25 x 35.5 cm (10 x 14 in). Accompanied by a separate title page with descriptions in English and French, recto and verso.