Osman Hamdy Bey

Osman Hamdi Bey painted the Ottoman world from the inside. Where European Orientalists showed passive figures in exotic settings, his men and women read, study, pray and work among carefully painted tiles, carpets, manuscripts and antiques, many of them objects he knew first hand.

Born in Constantinople in 1842, he went to Paris to study law and stayed nine years, training as a painter under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. Back home he became a leading public figure: director of the Imperial Museum from 1881, founder of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1882, and the archaeologist whose excavations at Sidon uncovered the Alexander Sarcophagus. His best-known painting, The Tortoise Trainer (1906), hangs in the Pera Museum in Istanbul. He died in Constantinople in 1910.

In his interiors, look at the exact rendering of tiles, textiles and calligraphy.