The Kizlar Agha (Chief Black Eunuch, Head Officer of the Palace)

Francis Smith, active 1763–1779

ca. 1765

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A Black man in elaborate Ottoman-style attire stands in a room, gesturing with his right hand. Two other figures are visible in the background, one to the left and one through a window on the right. This painting presents the Kizlar Agha, one of the highest-ranking officials in the eighteenth-century Ottoman court, wearing the turban and robes of his office and acting as keeper of the palace harem. Both he and the women were enslaved. The women were not allowed to leave, and the Kizlar Agha’s power was dependent upon his castration and his total loyalty to the sultan. This painting is not a portrait but rather an imagined view that the artist copied from works belonging to a popular genre depicting the diverse members of the Ottoman court. Smith produced at least thirty such images for his patron, Lord Baltimore, who had travel