Jožef Tominc trained as an artist in Rome in proximity to his mentor and rival, Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres. Tominc spent his later career working in Vienna and the north Italian region of his birthplace, Gorizia and Trieste (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) where he was feted as the leading portrait painter. This portrait of an unknown sitter in Ottoman attire was painted in Trieste, the cosmopolitan seaport of the Habsburg monarchy. One theory is that it was commissioned to document a stage in a marriage negotiation, based on the Arabic inscription in the letter, which reads: ‘For your dowry: To the honoured Nicola al-Habib the jewel(s), for my respected uncle in Trieste’.