Osman Hamdi Bey

In 1860, Osman Hamdi Bey went to Paris to study law but ended up studying art instead. In 1891 he became the director of the Imperial Museum of Antiquities. In 1910 he died. The painting to the left is a wonderful self portrait by thr master himself.

In Osman Hamdi Bey's short life time he redefined westerners’ notions of the east that had been formed from the Crusades to Islamic Spain. Hamdi Bey portrayed mainly intellectual activities and domestic visions of the orient and denounced the erotic version of the orient saying that nude images of concubines were a disgrace to women I thought however, that his images of women at home looked very European. They were not well received in Europe because they did not portray the “exciting and lustful” vision of women that westerners were use to seeing and thus expecting.



However, as I started looking at nineteenth century painters of the orient I realized that neither the French painters nor Hamdi Bey were reflecting reality. They were all living out their dreams and desires through their art. This was rather a shook, as I initially believed that Hamdi Bey's painting reflected the “real” Turkey because of how different his scenes were to his French counterparts. The fact is that Hamdi was living in a dream world too, that of Turkey’s glorious past – the Golden era of Turkey and so I had to ask what timeframe and which Golden era? His paintings express a deep sense of loss, while not calling for a return to the past. One gets the feeling that he realized that modernity comes with ambiguity.

I came to this conclusion because if you look at his paintings his figures are never dressed in modern oriental clothing but rather costumes and fabrics that depict medieval time which was the time of Islamic Spain and the Crusades. The settings of his paintings are also late medieval/early Ottoman times. His visual reconstruction of late Ottoman period also coincided with historical novels that had similar themes and were immensely popular with the general public. This was also a time of great upheaval in Turkey as they were going through huge changes and thus there was a sentiment of the loss of the glorious past.

Just like Gauguin, he had a huge collection of old photographs that he utilized in imagining the backgrounds in his paintings and many of them are just “make believe native” settings. The Janissaries (a Turkish infantryman in the Sultan’s guard) belonged to the medieval period and are incorporated in several of his paintings.

His painting of the 15th century green mosque in Bursa has different geographies put together: note the Syrian fabrics on the figures. This ties in with the growing interest in cross cultural studies in Europe where he trained as a painter. The Conversing Scholar picture which shows three scholars in traditional clothes, are in fact all pictures of him self.


In many of his pictures the onlookers are not asked to associate with the people in the pictures thus establishing a sense of detachment and distance.

Hamdi Bey's engagement with history and his position in Ottoman society was on a higher level and his main themes or points seemed to be inspired by literary works such as Byron and One Thousand and One Arabian Nights whose stories are partly traced back to medieval Arabic folk stories from the Caliphate era. Osman Hamid kept most of his paintings for himself, he didn’t sell them. When he died the state museum and private collectors along with the Ottoman Painters Society bought them.

What is important about his paintings are not how they were received at the time but how they relate to Turkey’s past.