(Istanbul 1842–1910)
Ottoman Lady, preparing for an outing, signed OHamdy Bey, oil on canvas on panel, 68 x 45 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Italy.

We are grateful to Prof. Edhem Eldem Ph.D for the scholarly advice and the assistance with cataloguing the present lot.

This beautiful portrait of an Ottoman lady preparing for an outing blends Western academic painting with Eastern sensibility.

The artist Osman Hamdi Bey was the first Turkish painter to fully embrace the Western style of painting. He was a bureaucrat, archeologist, museum director and one of Orientalism’s most successful painters. He held a prominent position in Turkish cultural life during the second half of the nineteenth century.

As the member of an upper-class Ottoman family, he lived a very Western-oriented life. In 1860, he was sent to Paris by his family to continue his education. There, he decided to pursue his interest in painting and studied art under the supervision of the famous French Orientalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. In 1869, after nine years in Paris, he returned to Istanbul. He was appointed Director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum in 1881, after holding several positions in the Ottoman bureaucracy and founded the Academy of Fine Arts soon thereafter. This still exists in Istanbul today as Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.

The present painting is undated, but we can assume that it was painted in the 1880s, as Hamdi depicted similar scenes with women in a number of works from this period.

It is an intimate view of a young lady in the harem looking at herself in a mirror as she gets dressed to go out. She appears to come from a privileged background and is wearing a yellow/ochre dress, an example of Hamdi’s interest in capturing the fashion of his day. She is seen tying her headscarf, known as a yemeni. Her black kaftan, an overcoat called a ferace, is lying on the sofa; this would be worn over her dress when she was outside. The room is decorated with a kavukluk, an Ottoman turban stand which is placed on the corner. There is a large blue sofa upholstered in çatma embroidered velvet from Bursa. She is kneeling on an ottoman silk yastik cushion, the floor covered by a hasır mat.

European Orientalist artists such as Gérôme and Boulanger had limited ways to observe daily life from the East. Indeed, they had no access to private areas, such as the harem. This led to depictions of an imaginary and mystified Orient. Hamdi Bey constructed a more realistic representation of private life in the Orient, such as in the present lot.