Melling Pasha's eighteen years as Imperial Architect gave him a privileged opportunity to observe the Ottoman Court. He became more familiar with the Ottoman palace than any Western artist since Gentile Bellini. He made many detailed drawings of the Sultan's palaces, Ottoman society, and vedute of Constantinople and its environs. He was rightly known as "the unrivalled painter of the Bosphorus". As stated in an anonymous travelogue written in about 1817, "Sometimes these pictures contain an excessive amount of detail in an endeavour to reflect the reality but they depict the modern buildings and landscapes of this city, every view of which is attractive, in a manner more successful than that achieved in the most sensitive written descriptions." He worked in a far more realistic manner than Matthäus Merian (1593–1650). Merian’s panorama engraving of Constantinople, published in 1653 and extensively reprinted, whilst claiming to represent the view of the city from the heights of Galata and Beyoğlu, depicts Ottoman capital as a city consisting only of minarets.