An engraving of Constantinople/Istanbul by the Scottish engraver William Miller, after a drawing by Thomas Allom (1847). The view looks across the Golden Horn toward “old city,” with the domes and minarets of the city's imperial mosques visible in the skyline.

Allom (1804–1872) was a British architect and topographical illustrator who traveled to Istanbul in the late 1830s and produced quite a large number of drawings of the city and its surroundings. Many were published in Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor (1838), one of the most widely circulated illustrated albums of the Ottoman capital in the 19th century. These albums were instrumental in (re)presenting the Ottoman Empire to a European audience.