This watercolour may be a design for an illustration, or some kind of trade card or even a painted sign for advertising. In the minds of early consumers, coffee was inevitably linked pictorially with its Ottoman origins. This image of the trader may be derived from a costume study of a Smyrna [modern Izmir] merchant. The crate of coffee has the merchant’s mark on the side, as well as the number 100, presumably a hundredweight.

Coffee, once a local drink made from the roasted berries of plants found in Yemen, has now permeated almost the entire world. The history of its early use is shrouded in legend, but it was supposed to have been used by dervishes to help their meditations. Beans exported from Mocha on the Arabian coast arrived in Istanbul in 1543. The Sultans were not sure at first what to do about the stimulating drink, (as it is not mentioned in the Quran) and tried to ban it for a while. They had the same difficulty with tobacco, which arrived in 1601.

Turkey merchants brought the habit of coffee drinking back to Europe, and coffee houses had opened in Oxford and London by the mid 1650s. A merchant called Pasqua Rosee from Izmir, who had seen Turkish coffee houses first hand, opened one of the first `at the sign of his own head’ near Cornhill in the City of London. Introduced by merchants, the coffee houses became fashionable places for merchants to meet, and provided a milieu for a new culture of business and political debate, allied with the introduction of modern banking and insurance systems. Although the early coffee houses of Britain seemed to have had plain interiors, unlike their elaborately decorated counterparts in Turkey, there were some symbolic references to their origin. The waiters sometimes wore turbans, and the painted sign outside was often that of the head of a Sultan. By the nineteenth century it is alleged that up to 57 different “Turk’s Head” signs could be found on coffee houses in London.