In The Carpet Seller, Aris Raissis depicts a carpet merchant's stall in the bazaar by the old gates of the city of Cairo. At the centre of the composition a bearded seller in a white turban holds up a patterned kilim for inspection, assisted by a second man who raises its upper edge, while the customer, dressed in flowing pale blue robes and a white headdress and leaning on a staff, examines the goods before him. Carpets and textiles hang from rails overhead and lie folded across the foreground, their reds, blues and golds picked out by a shaft of daylight falling from a staircase at the upper left, which illuminates the central transaction and leaves the depths of the bazaar in darkness.

Raissis draws on the colours of Egypt and the Ottoman world; the Turkish influence is present in the costume and in the carpets themselves. The subject carries a personal dimension, for Raissis was born in Cairo in 1962 to Greek parents, and the markets of the city belong to the world of his childhood. He trained in London at the Chelsea School of Fine Art and the Byam Shaw School of Art, graduating in 1985, and has devoted his career to applying the techniques of the Old Masters, referencing Rembrandt and Van Dyck, to his own subjects. He exhibited with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1986, and his commissioned portraits include HRH Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, unveiled at Claridge's in 1995 before an audience that included Queen Elizabeth II. In The Carpet Seller, that Old Master training is evident in the single light source, the deep shadow and the concentration on a moment of human exchange, applied to the city of his birth.