Armenian in Old Style of Turkish Costume

Mooney's reputation was established when his portrait of Ahmad bin Na'aman bin Muhsin bin Abdulla Al-k'abi al Bahraini, emissary of the Iman of Muscat and Zanzibar, was purchased by the New York Common Council for its gallery of images of distinguished visitors to, and personages associated with the city. The Imman's ship, the al-Sultanah appeared in New York harbor on April 30, 1840. While this trade mission was not altogether unexpected by certain Washington officials, no advance notice had been given New York, and such exotically garbed and costumed visitors as the Ahmad bin Na'aman, the officers, and crew of the ship caused great excitement. Mooney's portrait (New York City Hall; replica, Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts) was inevitably as colorful and exotic as its sitter.
Mooney's practice as a painter seemed fairly circumscribed to commissioned portraits of American men of various substantial social and professional stations. Memories of the aesthetic opportunity of portraying the very different character and costume of an Oriental dignitary could well have combined with a desire to remind his public of his past triumph and caused him to execute a figure piece in exotic trappings and background similar to those of the Iman of Muscat's emissary. "Armenian in Old Style of Turkish Costume," shown at the Academy in 1849, was likely such a speculative venture; a buyer for such a subject could not have been expected. It also seems likely that the work Mooney showed in Brooklyn nearly two decades later, under the title "An Eastern Courtier" was the same painting, rather than another essay in this specialized genre. By the early years of the twentieth century when Mooney's daughter listed her collection in her will, this painting was being called "Turkish Courtier," seemingly an elision of the two exhibition titles, and a further suggestion that the 1849 exhibition work is the painting that remained in the artist's and his daughter's possession until its bequest to the Academy.