Young Emir Studying

Osman Hamdi Bey was the most important Ottoman painter of the nineteenth century, and also an archaeologist, the founder of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and of the academy of fine arts there. He had trained in Paris in the studios of Gustave Boulanger and Jean-Léon Gérôme, the masters of Orientalist painting, and he uses their glossy technique here. But look at what he does with it. Where French Orientalists painted harems and slave markets, Hamdi paints a young man reading. His subject is the dignity and intellectual life of his own culture, seen from inside. Notice the light falling across the tiles and the studied stillness of the pose, taken from a photograph for which the painter himself often posed.

The museum acquired the painting in 2012, before it opened, and it hangs among European and Asian works of the same decades so that the conversation between Hamdi and his Paris teachers is visible on the wall. It is one of the most beloved pictures in the collection for visitors from the region. The book the emir reads has a leather cover and marbled edges; he holds his place with one finger, as if he does not intend to be disturbed.

Did You Know? Osman Hamdi Bey often posed for his own paintings, photographing himself in costume and working from the prints.