The office of the Directorate of Levant Trade was on the second floor of the town hall, at the back of the building. The room was used for meetings and receptions.
We no longer know exactly how it was arranged, but this inventory does tell us what was actually in the room. The inventory was compiled in 1810, as the Directorate neared its end, when the town hall was taken over as a royal palace.
It contained numerous books, maps and nautical charts. And above all, an incredible number of paintings. It was not a big room - around nine metres square - so the walls must have been completely covered in paintings. In addition, the office was also where much of the Directorate of Levant Trade’s archive was stored.
From the brief descriptions in the inventory it is not always easy to identify precise paintings. One particular description is certainly wrong: the View of Ankara is described as a Bayram Festival in Aleppo. It is extraordinary that almost all the paintings still exist, almost two centuries after the Directorate of Levant Trade was disbanded.
National Archive, The Hague, archive of the Directorate of Levant Trade
