Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 9780520355903, 9780520280533

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ISTANBUL EXCHANGES

MM publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the millard meiss publication fund of the college art association.

the publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the art endowment fund of the university of california press foundation.

ISTANBUL EXCHANGES Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Mary Roberts

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, Mary, 1965– author. Istanbul exchanges : Ottomans, orientalists, and nineteenth-century visual culture / Mary Roberts. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28053-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art, Ottoman—Turkey—Istanbul. 2. Turkey—History—Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918. I. Title. n7167.r63 2015 709.56—dc23 2014035667 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

To Lindy, Timothy, Sarah, Rachel, and Sophia

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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ix

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xv

Introduction: Istanbul’s Cultural Traffic

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1

1.

Ottoman Imperial Portraiture and Transcultural Aesthetics

2.

The Battlefield of Ottoman History

3.

Gérôme in Istanbul

4.

Istanbul’s Art Exhibitions

5.

Self-Portraiture in Ottoman Istanbul

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Epilogue: Istanbul Exchanges Notes 175 Selected Bibliography Index 241 •

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37

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225

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171

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137

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz, study for The Mora Rebellion, c. 1865–72 • 2 2. Vassilaki Kargopoulo, Tomb of Sultan Mahmud II (Tombeau du Sul. Mahmoud), n.d • 6 3. Detail of Vassilaki Kargopoulo, Tomb of Sultan Mahmud II (Tombeau du Sul. Mahmoud), n.d • 6 4. Gentile Bellini, Sultan Mehmed II, 1480

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5. John Young, Sultan Othman Khan I: Head of the Ottoman Imperial House, 1815 • 24 6. Luigi Schiavonetti, after Kostantin Kapıdağlı, Sultan Selim III, c. 1793

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7. John Young, Sultan Mustapha Khan III: Twenty-sixth Ottoman Emperor, 1815 • 27 8. John Young, Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan: Twenty-seventh Ottoman Emperor, 1815 • 28 9. John Young, Sultan Selim Khan III: Twenty-eighth Ottoman Emperor, 1815 10. John Young, Sultan Mahmoud Khan II: Thirtieth Ottoman Emperor, 1815 11. Abdullah Frères, Cartes-de-visite of the Young Album, n.d. 12. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman Fleet, c. 1865–72

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29 32

13. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 16 from Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864 • 40 14. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 18 from Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864 • 41 15. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 10 from Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864 • 42 16. Stanisław Chlebowski, “The First Regiment of Foot Soldiers,” page 2 from Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864 • 43 17. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 18 from Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864 • 44 18. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sultan Abdülaziz in the Topkapı Palace Courtyard, c. 1865–76 • 46 19. Kostantin Kapıdağlı, Sultan Selim III in Audience, c. 1789 20. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1876 21. Abdullah Frères, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1863

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46

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22. Abdul Aziz Khan, Sultan of Turkey, from Illustrated London News, 1867 23. W & D Downey, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1867

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24. Abdullah Frères, Sultan Abdülaziz, c. 1869

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50 •

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25. The Royal Gallery, Houses of Parliament, Westminster, 2011 26. Stanisław Chlebowski, Battle of Varna (1444), 1865

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27. Stanisław Chlebowski, Battle of Varna (1444), c. 1865–72

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28. Sultan Abdülaziz, sketch for The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, c. 1865–72 29. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, c. 1865–72

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30. Stanisław Chlebowski, study for The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, c. 1865–72 31. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Mora Rebellion, c. 1865–72 32. Sultan Abdülaziz, Sketch of a Rider, c. 1865–72

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57

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33. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Battle of Serdar Mehmed Paşa in Temeşvar, c. 1865– 72 • 59 34. Sultan Abdülaziz, sketch for The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress, c. 1865–72 35. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress, c. 1865–72 36. Sultan Abdülaziz, Battle Sketch, c. 1865–72

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37. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Siege of the Fortress of Semendre, c. 1865–72

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38. Stanisław Chlebowski, Entry of Sultan Mehmed II into Constantinople, c. 1874–84 • 62 39. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman inscriptions for battle paintings, c. 1865–72

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40. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman inscription for a battle painting, c. 1865–72

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41. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman inscription for a battle painting, c. 1865–72

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42. Stanisław Chlebowski, Attack on the Fortress of Belgrade at the Time of Sultan Mahmud I, c. 1865–72 • 64 43. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sultan Mehmed III at the Battle of Eğri, c. 1865–72 44. Stanisław Chlebowski, Ottoman Sultans, 1867

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67

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45. After Stanisław Chlebowski, “Voyage of H. M. the Empress—Constantinople— Reception by H. M. of the Diplomatic Corps in the Great Hall of the Beylerbeyi Palace—after a sketch by M. Chlebowski,” from L’Illustration, Journal Universel, 1869 • 68 46. Stanisław Chlebowski, The First Siege of Vienna, c. 1865–72 47. Stanisław Chlebowski, Battle of Vienna, c. 1882

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48. M. Sami, “The Appeal of Drawing to the Sultans,” 1914 49. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, c. 1879

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50. Abdullah Frères, Polychromatic Tile Panels (c. 1575) from the Imperial Baths, Installed in the Altın Yol, Topkapı Palace, n.d. • 76 51. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Sketch of Rüstem Paşa Mosque, 1875

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52. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bull and Picador (Tareau et picador), 1867–68 53. Detail of fig. 52

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54. Charles Émile van Marcke de Lummen, Arachon Basin (Basin d’Arachon), n.d. • 81 55. Gustave-Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger, Pompeian Interior (The Gynaeceum) (Intérieur Pompéien [Le Gynécée]), 1875 • 82 56. Giuseppe de Nittis, La Place de la Concorde, 1875

82

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57. Charles Joshua Chaplin, Roses of May (Roses de mai), Salon 1875

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58. Alfred Éloi Auteroche, A Pasture in Dives (Un herbage à Dives), n.d. 59. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Forest Light, 1887

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60. Ivan Aivazovsky, Eyüp in the Moonlight, 1874 61. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Sailboats, 1894

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62. Herman Alfred Leonard Wahlberg, An August Night in a Swedish Port (Nuit d’août dans un port de Suède), 1872 • 87 63. William Bouguereau, Italian Women at the Fountain (Italiennes à la fontaine), from Art Journal 1875 • 89 64. Pierre-Auguste Cot, Springtime (Printemps), c. 1873 65. Pierre-Auguste Cot, Springtime (Printemps), 1873

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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66. Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (Viscount Lepic and His Daughters Crossing the Place de la Concorde), c. 1875 • 93 67. Fausto Zonaro, Üsküdar Şemsi Paşa—The Maiden’s Tower, n.d.

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68. Distribution of Awards to Prize Winners at the Universal Exhibition . . . (Distribution des récompenses aux lauréats de l’Exposition universelle . . . ), from L’Illustration, Journal Universel, 1867 • 95 69. Sébah, Hippodrome, 1880

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70. François Dubois, Parade of Asâkir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye (Victorious Troops of Muhammad), n.d. • 96 71. Pierre Olivier Joseph Coomans, Rewards (Récompenses), 1874 72. Abdullah Frères, Palace Interior, n.d.

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73. Detail of fig. 72, showing Ivan Aivazovsky, Landscape, 1861

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74. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Lion in Its Lair (Lion dans sa grotte), 1875

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75. Jean-Léon Gérôme, An Egyptian Café (Café égyptien), c. 1876

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76. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk Dancing (Bachi-Bouzouk dansant), 1875 77. Goupil et Cie, after Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouks Dancing, 1881

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78. Sébah, Zeïbek (Zeybek) costumes (figures 1 and 2, Aïdin section), Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye (Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873), 1873 • 108 79. Abdullah Frères, Palace Interior, 1880

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80. Detail of fig. 79, showing Boulanger, The River Crossing (Le passage du gué) • 110 81. Pierre Désiré Guillemet, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1873

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82. Gustave-Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger, The River Crossing (Le passage du gué), n.d. • 116 83. Osman Hamdi, View of Baghdad (Sitti Zübeyde Türbesi), 1884 84. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Alemdağ Landscape, n.d.

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85. Members of the Central Committee of the Red Crescent (Membres du Comité central du Croissant Rouge), 1878 • 119 86. Le Dr Serviçen (detail of fig. 85)

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87. Osman Hamdi, Two Musician Girls, 1880

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88. Osman Hamdi, Prayer in the Green Tomb, 1881

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89. John Frederick Lewis, The Commentator on the Koran: Interior of a Royal Tomb, Bursa, Asia Minor, 1869 • 124 90. Osman Hamdi, Young Girl Placing a Vase, 1881

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91. Edwin Pears, Constantinople from the Bosporus, 1916

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125 •

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92. James Robertson, Castle of Asia on the Bosphorus, 1854 93. Mary Adelaide Walker, Roumeli Hissar, 1897 94. Mgrdich Givanian, Byron’s Dream, n.d.

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132

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95. James T. Willmore, after Charles Eastlake, Byron’s Dream, 1833 96. Ivan Aivazovsky, Sarayburnu, 1874

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97. Bedros Srabian, An Armenian Beggar from Van, 1882

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98. Fausto Zonaro, Ertuğrul Cavalry Regiment Crossing the Galata Bridge, 1901 • 139 99. Elisa Pante Zonaro, The Friday Parade, n.d.

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100. Detail of fig. 99, showing Fausto Zonaro walking behind Sultan Abdülhamid II’s carriage • 140 101. Fausto Zonaro, Self-Portrait, 1901 102. Fausto Zonaro, Dervishes, 1910

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103. Detail of fig. 102, showing the artist’s self-portrait

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104. Detail of fig. 102, showing a portrait of Elisa Pante Zonaro

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105. Goupil et Cie, after Albert Aublet, Ceremony of the Howling Dervishes of Scutari (Cérémonie des derviches hurleurs de Scutari), 1882 • 145 106. Fausto Zonaro, Self-Portrait, 1910

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107. Thomas Seddon, Lieutenant Richard Burton in Arab Dress, 1854 108. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Self-Portrait, n.d.

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151

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109. Hüseyin Avni Lifij, Self-Portrait, 1908–9

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110. Abdullah Frères, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1894

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111. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Still Life with Catalogue, 1905

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112. Sébah, print from glass plate negative of Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Artist at Work, n.d. • 157 113. Guillaume Berggren, Constantinople—Turkish House Interior (Constantinople— Intérieur de maison turque), n.d. • 158 114. Guillaume Berggren, Constantinople—Turkish House Interior (Constantinople— Intérieur de maison turque), n.d. • 159 115. Osman Hamdi, From the Harem, 1880

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116. Sébah, print from glass plate negative of Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Artist at Work, n.d. (diagram) • 167 117. Frederic Leighton, Self-Portrait, 1880

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118. Osman Hamdi, Women in Feraces, 1887

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the support of a diverse community of scholars and friends. I am delighted to have the opportunity to express my gratitude in these opening pages. Istanbul Exchanges has been generously supported by residential fellowships at the Getty Research Institute in 2008– 9 and at the Oakley Center for the Humanities and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2009–10. In 2011–12 I was a visiting scholar at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. My thanks to Professor S. Hollis Clayson, the former Director, for the invitation to join the Institute. At the different stages of this book’s gestation these institutions provided a stimulating context for dialogue about work in progress and the precious quiet time for thinking and writing. At each I had the good fortune to become a part of a unique community of scholars and expert interlocutors. The international research that underpins Istanbul Exchanges has been supported by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects Scheme. Illustrations have been funded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ Publication Subsidy Scheme. At the University of California Press I am grateful to Kari Dahlgren, former Art History editor, for her vision for this book and professionalism at all stages. My thanks also to Eric Schmidt and Karen Levine for stepping in to sponsor my book in its final months. Sincere thanks to Jack Young, Chalon Emmons, Paul Tyler, Pamela Morgan, Victoria Baker, and the editorial team at the Press for their careful and conscientious work bringing this book to fruition. For their enthusiastic support, expertise, and astute suggestions I thank the Press’s academic readers, Timothy Barringer, Zeynep Çelik, and Emine Fetvacı.

xv

Over the life of this project I have had the good fortune to work with two extremely talented research assistants: Hannah Williams during the project’s germination and Robert Wellington through its final stages. I am grateful for their enthusiastic, intelligent, and imaginative engagement with all aspects of the project and its research adventures. I am especially grateful to Robert for his acute editorial eye at the writing stage. I thank my dear friend, Evra Günhan, for her research-translation work in Istanbul and her great generosity over many years. I also thank the following translators: Julie Rose, Robert Wellington, and Gay McAuley for assistance with French translations, Nurullah Şenol for Ottoman, Vigen Galstyan for Armenian, and Kate Sanetra-Butler and Ania Merunowicz for Polish. From the outset it has been my conviction that drawing together the diverse illustrations that appear within the pages of this book will provide insight into the visual world of nineteenth-century Istanbul. A number of them have not been published before, or are rarely seen outside Turkey. Gathering these illustrations has been its own adventure and would not have been possible without the help of the private collectors and staff at the institutions who hold these artworks. For generously providing contacts to assist me sourcing images in Turkey I am particularly indebted to Özalp Birol, Edhem Eldem, and Nihat Erşen. My thanks to Elisa Cazzato for pursuing image permissions in Italy and Vigen Galstyan for doing so in Armenia. Staff at the following archives and libraries have generously provided access to research material in their collections: Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul; Atatürk Kütüphanesi; Gülsen Sevinç Kaya and Dr. Bülent Arı at the Milli Saraylar Arşivi; İstanbul Üniversitesi Merkez Kütüphanesi; IRCICA; Topkapı Palace Museum Archives; Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Istanbul; Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes; Colonel Bülent Tütüncüoğlu and İlkay Karatepe at the Istanbul Military Museum; Kryzysztof Frankowicz and Iwona Hojda at the Jagiellonian Library, Jagiellonian University, Kraków; Czartoryski Museum Library, Kraków; Aleksandra Krypczyk and Barbara Ciciora at the National Museum in Kraków; The School of Oriental and African Studies Library, University of London; The British Library; National Art Library; Victoria and Albert Museum; curator Edouard Papet at Musée d’Orsay; Bibliothèque nationale de France; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; and Frances Terpak, Beth Guynn, and Tracey Schuster at the Getty Research Institute. I also acknowledge Gerald Ackerman’s unstinting generosity with information about Jean-Léon Gérôme’s work. A special thanks to Tadeusz Majda at the National Museum in Warsaw for sharing his knowledge about Ottoman-Polish cultural relations. I am also indebted to the following scholars and collectors in Istanbul for generously providing access to their holdings: Garo Kürkman, Erol Makzume, and Bahattin Öztuncay. At the University of Sydney my scholarship has been generously supported by my Chair of Department, Mark Ledbury, and Head of School, Annamarie Jagose. I also thank my Department colleagues and the Schaeffer Librarians—John Spencer, Peter Wright, Tony Green, and Nicholas Keyzer. Along the way I have been inspired by cur-

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rent and former students and the members of our postcolonial studies reading group: Kathleen Davidson, Phoebe Scott, Vigen Galstyan, Molly Duggins, Robert Wellington, Rebecca Kummerfeld, and Andrew Yip. To my friend and long-standing supporter John Schaeffer, a sincere thank you for your commitment to my research and teaching as part of your generous contribution to the arts in Australia. Zeynep Çelik’s exemplary scholarship on nineteenth-century Ottoman architecture has inspired this inquiry into art in the same period. I also want to thank Samuel Williams for many provocative and creative conversations about this project. For dialogue about nineteenth-century art, postcolonial theory, and many of the issues addressed in this book, I thank the following scholars and friends: Esra Akcan, Robert Aldrich, Scott Allan, Sussan Babaie, Jennifer Barrett, Timothy Barringer, Ali Behdad, Carolin Behrmann, Roger Benjamin, Martin Berger, Lisa Blas, Sibel Bozdoğan, Michael Brown, Anita Callaway, Elizabeth Childs, Julia Clancy-Smith, Holly Clayson, Julie Codell, Michael Cole, Wanda Corn, Jorge Coronado, Bodo von Dewitz, André Dombrowski, Hartmut Dorgerloh, Thierry de Duve, Holly Edwards, Hannah Feldman, Anne Ferran, Alessia Frassani, Barbara Gaehtgens, Thomas Gaehtgens, Luke Gartlan, Marc Gotlieb, Talinn Grigor, Beth Guynn, Jos Hackforth-Jones, Michael Ann Holly, Renata Holod, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Lev Kenaan, Mark Ledbury, Reina Lewis, Rob Linrothe, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Courtney Martin, Gay McAuley, Kirsten McKenzie, Nancy Micklewright, Keith Moxey, Carol Ockman, Chiara O’Reilly, Nabila Oulebsir, Robert Ousterhout, Agnès Penot-Lejeune, Andrew Perchuk, Andrew Schulz, Peter-Klaus Schuster, Avinoam Shalem, Larry Silver, Mark Simpson, Frances Terpak, and David Van Zanten. To colleagues and friends in Istanbul, my heartfelt appreciation for such a warm welcome over many years. Thank you for the conversations, insights, and experiences in this intriguing and puzzling city that have inflected this project in innumerable ways: Behiç Ak, Özalp Birol, Ömer Hayyam Çelik, Edhem Eldem, Ahmet Ersoy, Semra Germaner, Sabiha Göloğlu, Evra Günhan, Aykut Gürçağlar, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Zeynep İnankur, Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Barış Kıbrıs, Necati Önel, Leyla Özalp, Pınar Öztamur, Günsel Renda, and Nurullah Şenol. A special thanks to my friends at the Büyük Londra, especially Azimet Karakuş and in fond memory of Fatih Hatay. To my friends in Sydney, I thank you for being such an enthusiastic, inspiring and patient cheer squad: Anne Ferran, Les Blakeborough, Barbara Campbell, Roger Benjamin, Kathleen Davidson, Nicole Mahony, Kate Sands, Rick Iedema, and Helen Juillerat. Finally, I extend heartfelt thanks to my family: John, Gwenneth, Lindy, Robert, Timothy, Sarah, Kevin, Rachel, Howard, Sophia, Geoffrey, Kathy, Lucy, Olive, George, and Henry. This book is dedicated to my siblings with love and great admiration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION Istanbul’s Cultural Traffic

[O]ur Sultan practices and teaches all of the arts . . . with a canvas and a little red paint, he can indicate in four brushstrokes the whole design of a painting. . . . His Majesty is as strong in Arabic and Persian as in Turkish . . . and he has written some delightful stories and charming poetry. SERKIS BEY, 1875

A sketch of a battle scene in the National Museum in Kraków bears out the veracity of the Armenian architect Serkis Bey’s (Sarkis Balian’s) claim about Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz’s skill and passion for painting. Red ink lines have been placed quickly and confidently over the surface of this meticulous pencil sketch (fig. 1), additions made and then deleted in favor of others to invigorate the scene of combat. The central cavalrymen are now united under an Ottoman standard, and a change in the tilt of their torsos and heads has them straining further forward, rising out of their saddles, fiercely engaged in the rush of the charge. The remarkable economy of the sultan’s gestural lines ensures the inclusion of a Greek foot soldier on the right, whose upraised sword urging his comrades forward now forms the compositional focus for the Ottoman charge. The addition of slain figures around him and across the foreground raises the stakes of this combat, and the greater massing of figures injects energy through spatial compression. Ottoman forces overwhelm the Greek rebels in their path, as if to capture the power and heroism of Ottoman history. That sketch in the National Museum in Kraków is an intriguing fragment of a visual dialogue that transpired in a Dolmabahçe Palace studio between Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz and his Polish court painter Stanisław Chlebowski. Between 1865 and 1872 they collaborated to produce a cycle of paintings depicting historical Ottoman battles. The sultan’s red ink revisions make this a triumphant Ottoman history that emphasizes the force of combat on the field of battle. A divergent sensibility is evident in the contrast between the measured draftsmanship of Chlebowski’s pencil sketch and the gestural speed of Abdülaziz’s amendments. The sultan redirects his court painter’s

1

Figure 1. Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz, study for The Mora Rebellion, page 14 of the Czaykowska album, c. 1865–​72. Pencil and ink on paper, 23 × 34.3 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a-6688.

skills in figurative painting to ensure the energy of combat prevails over the familiar conventions of narrative legibility in contemporary European academic painting. The sultan not only asserted his compositional preferences for this battle series, he specified the inclusion of Ottoman inscriptions on the top right of six paintings. The addition of these inscriptions created a hybrid visual language that referenced the word and image relationship of the Ottoman miniature tradition while relocating it into the Western mode of easel painting. The afterlife of this and sixty-eight other sketches produced through such a unique artistic conversation is as intriguing as their intimate collaborative mode of production: they circulated within both Ottoman and Orientalist circles. The sketches remained among Chlebowski’s personal effects when he returned to Europe. Selections of them were published in several art journals and travelogues in Poland, England, and the Ottoman Empire.1 In Europe they were enmeshed within shifting perceptions of the Ottoman state, whereas within the Ottoman capital they served a range of different purposes. In the 1860s and ’70s the cycle of battle paintings created an Ottoman historical narrative that served Sultan Abdülaziz’s modernizing state politics. By the early twentieth century, the sketches that he made for this cycle were taken up as part of a developing narrative of Ottoman and later Turkish modern art. They were revered as

2   •   I ntroduction

evidence of the personal talent and passion that motivated the sultan’s important early efforts at renewal of the fine arts within the empire.2 A letter from Jean-Léon Gérôme to Stanisław Chlebowski, written on October 19, 1875, draws a more familiar artistic figure into this nexus, but does so in a way that reveals a less familiar side of the most renowned of the French Orientalists. This letter to his former student is proof that Gérôme was instrumental in overseeing the “type and quality” of a consignment of paintings purchased for the palace through his fatherin-law’s firm, Goupil et Cie. It also declares the French master’s respect for his former Ottoman student Ahmed Ali (later known as Şeker Ahmed Paşa), who was supervising these acquisitions from inside the palace in Istanbul in his role as yaver (aide-de-camp) to the sultan.3 Even more surprising than the disclosure of this network facilitating Ottoman royal patronage of contemporary European art is Gérôme’s declaration that he awaits the sultan’s approbation of his Bashi-Bazouk (Başıbozuk) painting. He writes: “As I wish to leave the Sultan completely free, I will see that he is told that if the painting is not to his liking, either because of the manner in which I have treated the subject, or because of the price, or for any other reason, he has only to send it back to me purely and simply for, as I make sure that my works are dearly paid for, I want those who own them to be happy to have them, even if they are Sultans.”4 Despite Gérôme’s somewhat imperious tone this is a striking reversal of a power dynamic between East and West that until now has been associated with the nineteenth-century European reception of Gérôme’s Orientalist paintings. This web of patronage involving the most prominent Ottomans and Orientalists of the period, and the artworks created in and transferred to Istanbul through these conduits, exemplify the network of transcultural relations and the networked objects with which this book is engaged. This book recasts the terms in which European Orientalism is understood within art history by shifting the focus from Europe to Istanbul and examining cross-cultural artistic exchanges that emerged in the cosmopolitan capital of the Ottoman Empire. The project’s focus is the development of the arts from the 1860s to the early 1880s, from the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz to the early years of Sultan Abdülhamid II, before the School of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi) was opened in 1883. But my study is not exclusively delimited by that time frame. I also explore precedents for the visual exchanges that occurred in this period and some of the aftereffects of the cross-cultural encounters of these pivotal decades. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, while European Orientalists traveled to Istanbul, inspired by the Islamic and Byzantine heritage of the ancient city, the first generation of Istanbul’s Paris-trained Ottoman artists returned to the city with ambitions to reshape the visual arts in their capital. During this formative period for the emergence of easel painting in the Ottoman public sphere, these cultural initiatives received the highest levels of patronage from the Ottoman court and the foreign diplomatic communities. Motivated by very different imperatives, but compelled by a fascination for each other’s culture, artists and patrons developed significant collaborative networks.

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This project calls into question any binary definition of Ottoman and European visual cultures by revealing that there was no simple distinction between an Orientalist and an Ottoman cultural agenda in nineteenth-century Istanbul. A vibrant artistic milieu emerged in the second half of the century that was extremely heterogeneous, including Ottoman, Ottoman-Armenian, French, Italian, British, Polish, and OttomanGreek artists. The exchanges and alliances that Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans formed with European artists and patrons in this context are significant, I argue, precisely because of the diversity of cultural backgrounds and motivations that coalesced during this period. In a context where rigid distinctions between East and West were defied, identity became multivalent. Ottoman painters adapted and redefined contemporary European notions of artistic identity while expatriate Europeans derived their status from positions as official artists to the Ottoman court.

NET WORK S

Works of art by Ottomans and Orientalists produced in this context were created, apprehended, and interpreted within a cross-cultural web of meanings. Sometimes this web was a battlefield of competing representations, at other times a negotiated matrix of divergent positions. (The role of negotiated engagement within visual culture should not be underestimated in a century when diplomacy was the key strategy for the survival of the Ottoman Empire.) My study focuses on the principal nodes of cultural contact within this matrix and unearths the networks that facilitated the transmission of ideas and images. Such cross-cultural transmission in nineteenth-century Istanbul was also entangled within patterns of misinterpretation, blockage, and rupture as visual forms were created, reshaped, censored, or productively misinterpreted in the environments into which they were transplanted. This served to produce divergent forms of indigenous agency. This book analyzes nineteenth-century Istanbul as a site for art’s production, but also a place through which ideas and artworks were trafficked. The diverse archives from which this inquiry draws material—​in Turkey, Poland, France, Italy, Denmark, Armenia, and England—​is in itself evidence of just how much art in Istanbul in this period was defined by the movement of artists, works of art, and artifacts in and out of the city. My concern is to investigate mobility as a condition through which diverse interpretations were produced. As Deleuze and Guattari articulate, history too readily immobilizes its objects, grinding them to a halt.5 In this book I track the mobility of works of art and their vectors of meaning as a key to understanding the significance and role of art in nineteenth-century Istanbul in relation to global cultures. I approach Ottoman Istanbul as a position on the cultural map from which there are horizons of possibility that are distinct from the horizons of Paris, London, or elsewhere. The challenge for the art historian is to discern how cultures were viewed from these multiple horizons, how individual artists experienced such multiple vantage points, and how their experiences shifted over the course of their careers.

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When the first generation of young Ottoman artists was sent to train in Paris in the 1860s, the Ottoman capital had no equivalent to the French Salon or the British Royal Academy, nor was there a national museum of art. The School of Fine Arts founded in 1882 and opened in 1883 was a relative latecomer to the Istanbul capital and a national museum of painting was founded only in 1937.6 Whether artists based in the European capitals sought to be embraced by these academic institutions or defined their practice as part of an avant-garde that rejected such structures (as was increasingly the case in the second half of the century), the cultural institutions—​salons, academies, museums—​remained the most powerful defining features of the artistic milieu in Paris and London.7 This was not so in Ottoman Istanbul. If easel painting was not primarily being produced and exhibited within such institutions, then where was it located in Istanbul in this period? And how should our analysis be reframed to account for such spatial, structural, and conceptual differences in the production and reception of art in the Ottoman capital? Easel painting could be seen in the Ottoman palaces, foreign embassies, and Christian churches, as well as in the private homes of the Ottoman elites, the expatriates, and Levantines. It was taught in private studios in Pera run by European-trained foreigners, in the Ottoman military academy, and in select government and minority community schools. Exhibitions were intermittently held in small commercial and community venues, including tourist hotels, photographic studios, foreign embassies, and municipal halls.8 In short, easel painting (along with other forms of visual culture) circulated within linguistically and culturally diverse local, foreign, and expatriate communities in Istanbul. In the 1860s and ’70s reports and reviews of art exhibitions appeared in the local Ottoman, expatriate, and Armenian newspapers and, like the exhibitions themselves, the art writing was sporadic and unsystematic.9 There was no extensive art-critical press in nineteenth-century Istanbul, unlike in London and Paris where the annual Royal Academy and Salon exhibitions were regularly reviewed in newspapers and art journals, thereby creating a broader bourgeois public for art.10 The notion of an art public in Istanbul in this period is more heterogeneous and elusive than in the European capitals, thus compounding the challenge of providing a precise definition of the public for art in the Ottoman capital. A rare undated photograph of a sign advertising an art exhibition located on the corner of the old city’s main thoroughfare, Divanyolu, addresses passersby in two languages—​Ottoman and French (fig. 2 and fig. 3)—​signaling the organizers’ perception that their potential audience was local as well as foreign. For the art historian the public presence of the sign on this main thoroughfare in the old city also signals that even though easel painting was primarily an elite preoccupation among the foreign communities and Ottomans in the city, it also intermittently had a public face seeking a broader audience. As this study brings to light, print culture and photography also played a role in disseminating easel painting. Art in nineteenth-century Istanbul was produced, circulated, and exhibited through intimate circles and collaborative networks involving a relatively small number of key

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Figure 2. Vassilaki Kargopoulo, Tomb of Sultan Mahmud II (Tombeau du Sul. Mahmoud), n.d. Albumen print, 21.2 × 27 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14). Figure 3. Detail of Vassilaki Kargopoulo, Tomb of Sultan Mahmud II (Tombeau du Sul. Mahmoud), n.d.

Ottoman Muslim artists and patrons. Ottoman-Armenian Christian artists, architects, and photographers, often with extensive international networks, worked for the palace and were an important part of this artistic milieu. So too European expatriates (often amateurs with strong connections to their national embassies) organized art events and hosted visiting professional artists. These distinct but interconnected local communities of artists facilitated a range of surprising alliances. The links between these culturally

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diverse groups and individuals were provisional and peripatetic. What emerged from these transient collaborations in this formative period is one of the central concerns of my study. An approach to this period that is framed (whether implicitly or explicitly) around the study of institutional structures and their progressive introduction into the city seems bound to reproduce a narrative of the belated and derivative status of Ottoman easel painting and, in turn, Turkish modern art. In this book, I foreground nodes of cultural contact and vectors of movement of ideas, artists, and artworks rather than institutions and lineages to emphasize the multiple directions in which visual culture circulated.11 Where a focus on influence foregrounds a unidirectional transposition of academic realism from Paris to Istanbul (from Gérôme and Boulanger to their students), I am interested in the mutually transforming encounters facilitated by Istanbul’s art networks and the multiple effects of their practice. While Istanbul’s art scene in the late 1860s and ’70s was defined by the absence of art institutions, it did not exist in an institutional vacuum. Easel painting was not a marginal practice in Ottoman Istanbul; rather, it was enmeshed within political and military structures, in particular within palace culture, diplomatic circles, and the military academies. Within this context, the production of art often intersected with Ottoman state ideology to become a tool in cultural diplomacy. In addition to the sultans’ artistic patronage, key Ottoman elites commissioned and collected easel painting and the first generation of Paris-trained Ottoman painters became senior figures within the Ottoman bureaucracy, affording them an effective position from which to foster the visual arts. Easel painting also had a role in military training. Technical drawing and painting skills were introduced into the curricula of the Ottoman Imperial Army Engineering School (Mühendishane-i Berrî-i Hümâyun) established in 1795 and from the mid-nineteenth century onward in the military academy.12 Although the purpose of this training was primarily for strategic military rather than artistic purposes, a number of local artists emerged from this context.13 These changes to military training were part of a broader program of modernizing and centralizing reforms instituted across the century by successive sultans and the empire’s powerful administrative elites. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire was a large decentralized entity stretching across North Africa as far as Algeria, incorporating the Arabian Peninsula, and extending up into Europe from Bosnia across to the Caucasus. As the century progressed, these boundaries shifted dramatically.14 The Ottoman rulers faced the dual threats of external pressure from ascendant Western European imperial powers and internal pressures from emergent nationalist movements. New state ideologies emerged in response to such threats to the polity. The concept of Ottomanism, an ideology of unity within the diversity of a multiethnic, multireligious empire, held sway during the Tanzimat era (1839–​76). Ottomanism then took on a more pronounced Muslim inflection, with pan-Islamism being promoted during the long reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–​1909).15 Ottoman foreign policy across this period was largely premised upon diplomatic negotia-

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tion and forging strategic international military alliances. Top-down Ottoman reform of the empire’s administrative and military institutions based on Western models was a response to the empire’s increased integration within a modern global economy. The Rose Chamber Edict of November 3, 1839, that ushered in the Tanzimat period is but one of the landmark moments in this century of change. As Şükrü Hanioğlu argues, “Westernization . . . was not just a matter of importation. Rather, it was a complex process of acculturation, in which Western ideas, manners, and institutions were selectively adopted, and evolved into different forms set in a different context.”16 As the capital of the only Muslim empire on the world stage in the nineteenth century, Istanbul is a unique and significant site from which to investigate the role of the visual arts in international politics. This was a period of intense cultural debate in the empire’s capital, as Ottoman elites responded to the global economic and political ascendancy of Western Europe by redefining their culture as Westernizing but not Western.17 The city was home to the sultanate, the empire’s administrative and political leaders, and the foreign diplomatic community. Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city with distinct neighborhoods reflecting the empire’s cultural diversity and the capital’s role as a political and economic hub within the region. As demonstrated by Zeynep Çelik, the city’s fabric underwent complex changes in the nineteenth century through intensive (albeit often piecemeal) city planning, architectural, transportation, and industrial projects.18 Istanbul, especially the district of Pera, was the site for many of the empire’s experiments in modernization.19 As the Ottoman imperial capital since 1453, the city had long been the site for the construction of grand edifices, including the imperial mosques and palaces. Most notable among them was the Topkapı Palace situated at the tip of the peninsula in the old city.20 It was the primary royal residence and seat of government into the nineteenth century. The relocation of the sultan’s primary residence to the Dolmabahçe Palace in 1856 crystallized a major demographic shift beyond the historic peninsula that had already been underway throughout the eighteenth century with the development of yalıs (waterside mansions) and summer palaces for the royal family and the Ottoman elites along the Bosporus and the Golden Horn.21 The presence of Western architectural forms is demonstrably evident in the French Beaux Arts style of the Dolmabahçe Palace. The visual arts had long played a role in palace and elite culture in the Ottoman capital, fostered (along with architecture, calligraphy, poetry, and music) under the patronage of the sultans, members of the royal household, and the Ottoman elites. The major shift in Ottoman painting that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be broadly characterized as a move from the workshop tradition of miniature painting to easel painting. The key intermediary in this transition was the transformation of wall painting from decorative schema to landscapes, a trend initiated in the mid-eighteenth century with landscape murals on the walls of the harem in the Topkapı Palace.22 By the mid-nineteenth century oil paintings on canvas became the chosen art form to adorn the walls of the new Ottoman palaces, with the portraits of the sultans leading

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the way. Figural representation had long been part of the Ottoman art of the book, but the new modes of public display of easel painting at times provoked controversy among the broader populace—​most notably in 1836 when Mahmud II ordered his portraits to be hung in several public administrative and military buildings.23 Such shifts in the function and role of painting was not an immediate change nor was it an absolute break with tradition, gradually occurring across the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Over this period visual culture was increasingly used to facilitate international political alliances and promote the empire on the world stage (easel paintings and photographs were intermittently included in the Ottoman pavilions at international exhibitions from 1867 onward, for example).24 For an elite Ottoman audience visual culture also became a vehicle for articulating the ideology of Ottomanism.25 The center-periphery relations of Orientalism were complicated by the Ottoman state’s procedures of distinguishing between culture in its urban centers and its peripheries. The state’s efforts at reform and imperial centralization were made in response to the external challenge of European imperial ascendancy and nascent nationalist movements within the empire. This was often articulated through a hierarchical distinction between the cosmopolitan elites and those from the empire’s peripheries. The elites were committed to cultural progress through the selective embrace of Western-inspired modernization, while regional cultures were cast as relatively backward, especially those from the empire’s eastern Arab territories. Selim Deringil and Ussama Makdisi have cogently articulated this phenomenon of elite Ottoman engagement with European cultures through strategies of adaptation, emulation, and resistance, with the latter coining the term “Ottoman Orientalism.”26 In practice Ottoman Orientalism was a double-edged sword—​Ottoman modernization and the cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman metropolis challenged European stereotypes of the immutable Orient even as they defined a premodern Orient within the empire’s eastern borders. Crafting the image of the modern Ottoman state was accompanied by a renewed interest in Ottoman history. Visual culture including architecture, photography, city planning, archaeology, and easel painting along with literature and history writing became crucial to the processes of articulating the distinctiveness of modern Ottoman identity.27 In this context, adopting and adapting the visual language of Western art to represent the empire’s cultural heritage proved to be an ideal means of articulating Ottoman cultural progress. It would be misleading, however, to overstate the role of easel painting in the political project of empire for the Ottomans in the nineteenth century. Architecture, urban planning, and public ceremony had a more secure footing as forms through which Ottoman state ideology was articulated to a local audience in this period. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, these forms of visual culture were also deeply embedded within the state’s efforts to implement reforms that would secure their place on the world stage.28 They took on particular importance throughout the nineteenth century with the increasing instability of the empire through the aforementioned external pressures

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exerted by the major European powers and internal pressures of emergent proto-nationalist movements that threatened the empire’s political and territorial integrity on many fronts. In the later decades of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s reign, photography was to play a crucial role in state ideology, marked especially by the Abdülhamid albums gifted to the United States and Britain.29 In my view it is precisely because easel painting did not have a clearly defined role in statecraft that those moments when it did become entangled within political debates are so significant. This aspect of visual culture was not an exclusive organ for official Ottoman ideology. Thus easel painting became enmeshed within a range of claims and counterclaims by Istanbul’s minority and expatriate communities as well as being a vehicle for expressing elite Ottoman values.

IN BET WEEN ART’S HIS TORIES

Art in nineteenth-century Istanbul is located at the fulcrum of three subfields within the discipline of art history: histories of Islamic art, non-Western regional modernisms, and nineteenth-century European Orientalism. This book challenges how art produced in the Ottoman capital in the nineteenth century has been construed within each. With its focus on the visual arts produced through negotiations between inherited Ottoman traditions and imported visual conventions, this study responds to Finbarr Barry Flood’s challenge to the marginalization of the nineteenth century within histories of Islamic art.30 The traditional heartland of this subfield has been in the pre- and early modern periods, and Islamic art from the late eighteenth century to the present has been framed within a narrative of decline. It has been construed as a period of decadence where cultures of the modern Near and Middle East gave way to European influences in the visual arts. This is most dramatically characterized as the shift from miniature to easel painting.31 Flood stresses the importance of challenging this exclusion of recent and living traditions. He attributes the occlusion to lingering strains of nostalgia where artistic excellence within Islamic culture is located in the time prior to European colonial ascendancy. Such a tendency, Flood argues, has troubling resonances with a familiar trope of Orientalist discourse, where “the closer one gets to the time of the European narrator, the more negative the aesthetic evaluation of ‘hybrid’ art-making traditions.”32 This tendency to isolate Islamic art within a “valorized past” from which “living tradition” is excluded, he suggests, amounts “to a denial of coevalness with the art of European modernity.”33 Eschewing a teleology of decline, this project explores the ways in which Ottoman art of this period is informed by cross-cultural aesthetics, with subtle procedures of adaptation that have recourse to the simultaneous reinvention of imported and local art forms. Until recently histories of Islamic art sidelined the art produced in this period for being too modern and too Western. Yet within a conventional art-historical narrative of the emergent modernist avant-garde, nineteenth-century Ottoman art has suffered the opposite problem of not being modern enough. Initially forged within the French

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academic tradition, Ottoman, and later Turkish, modernism has shared the fate of other regional modernisms within the discipline of art history. If they feature at all in an expanded narrative of global modernism, they are construed as derivative and belated iterations of the European modernist avant-garde.34 A number of the Ottoman artists analyzed in this book were academically trained and did not affiliate themselves with the French avant-garde. So too, the most significant Ottoman collection of contemporary art in nineteenth-century Istanbul, formed by the palace under the sultans’ patronage, was constituted predominantly of academic painting. Yet to construe this as an undigested imitation of conservative Western aesthetic conventions and tastes is both historically inaccurate and conceptually naïve with regard to processes of cultural transfer and translation.35 Here I challenge the assumption that nineteenth-century Ottoman art is a direct transposition of retardataire French academic conventions. The visual arts in Istanbul in this period are significant because of the distinctive aesthetic forms that emerge through an artistic practice that is hinged between Ottoman tradition and modernity. While the production of Ottoman miniature painting had ceased by the mid-nineteenth century there was a continuity of other practices, including calligraphy. Sultan Abdülaziz’s experimentation—​incorporating Ottoman calligraphic text within the pictorial space of easel painting—​is one significant example of a flexible approach to the form. We find in Osman Hamdi Bey’s work a complex mediation of flatness and perspectival depth that has some surprising affinities with contemporaneous French avant-garde visual experiments, but which is derived from his simultaneous engagement with European academic and Ottoman aesthetic conventions.36 In an analogous example, the effects of spatial ambiguity were immediately apparent to John Berger in a landscape by Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Osman Hamdi’s contemporary). Berger found the work powerful precisely because its maker had not seamlessly assimilated his way of representing the forest into modes of representation derived from his European training. Instead he was working between European and Ottoman pictorial traditions.37 So too, the assimilation of academic art into the Ottoman royal palaces came to serve local agendas and tastes as much as it may have modified such priorities and aesthetic preferences. In other words, cultural transfers such as these were not passively received by artist or collector, but were modified in their new environments as much as they in turn had transformative effects within that new context. Another way this book eschews a single and progressivist modernist narrative is through a synchronic focus on the ways in which art in nineteenth-century Istanbul was part of a larger modern global culture. This is achieved by bringing to light the cultural traffic between Europe and Ottoman Istanbul and focusing on the mutually transformative effects of culturally diverse networks of visiting and resident artists. Within the field of nineteenth-century European art-historical inquiry there has been a burgeoning interest in the study of circuits of exchange through visual cultures between imperial and colonial contexts, and more recently between differing peripheral colonial sites.38

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The emergence of the question as to whether Paris is still the cultural capital of the nineteenth century is an equivocation that was unimaginable thirty years ago.39 This type of questioning reflects the shifts in the heartland of the field as it grapples with the challenge of reconceptualizing the new geography of a global history of nineteenthcentury art as something more than a “cheerful [now global geographical] diversification” of the subfield.40 In the geographic context of North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, the recent shift in this field of nineteenth-century art history has pivoted around the impact of inserting visual cultures from the region into a critical reassessment of European Orientalism. While debates about the French impact in the Maghreb have focused on resistant visual culture of the colonized indigene and the complexities of the colonial context from which it emerged, art in the Ottoman capital was formed under the aegis of a very different political rubric.41 As a case study of the political and cultural geography of the region, the Ottomans are particularly interesting because in the empire’s capital the sultan and his elites were key patrons of the arts. Unlike the Algerian artists Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim, French-trained Ottoman artists Osman Hamdi Bey and Şeker Ahmed Paşa were not under foreign colonial tutelage once they returned to Istanbul but were senior bureaucrats able to have an impact on the formation of the arts in their empire’s capital. But there is good reason to be cautious about heralding this as an unproblematic culture of resistance to European imperialism from the other side of the Mediterranean. The historical situation was more complex. Historians of Ottoman culture have recently been grappling with the implications of the centrist and imperial status of the nineteenth-century Ottoman elites. By the same token, neither can the Ottomans be consigned as an unproblematic variant of nineteenth-century European imperial culture. While Ottoman elite culture embodied forms of othering that created Orientalist distinctions between imperial center and periphery, what they produced and indeed their own cultural position as cosmopolitan non-Western elites was often perceived in Europe as an unsteady, unfamiliar form of otherness. It is thus necessary to sustain an awareness of the abiding tensions and contradictions within the term “Ottoman Orientalism,” because it simultaneously contained Ottoman imperial attitudes vis-à-vis their Arab peripheries while at the same time challenging European notions of the Orient as other tout court. These questions about varied responses to European Orientalism by artists and patrons from the region proceed hand in hand with a more precise understanding of diverse forms of engagement by European artists. Through this study I make the case for expanding the canon of European Orientalism to incorporate these expatriates—​ many of whom are unknown, or little known, within accounts of European art because their careers were primarily forged in the Ottoman capital. The individuals of particular interest to me are those whom I have elsewhere characterized as intimate outsiders: those with some form of privileged access to Ottoman culture who were nonetheless

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foreigners within that context.42 Like their Ottoman contemporaries who trained in Europe, they were often the cultural brokers between one context and another, whose art and cultural production straddled multiple axes of cross-cultural significance. Stanisław Chlebowski and Mary Adelaide Walker, for example, were simultaneously producing art for the Ottoman palaces under instruction to elite patrons while also acting as hosts and conduits for European Orientalist painters such as Gérôme and Henriette Browne when they visited the city.43 In this book I explore their positions as artist-entrepreneurs trafficking between contexts in order to sustain their practice. I also analyze the ways in which their time in Istanbul impacted upon their self-perception as artists and the multifarious ways their self-portraits created metaphors of their status between cultures. Focusing on the interactions between expatriate and Ottoman artists and patrons provides a complex picture of cultural exchange, dialogue, and resistance between cultures of the region and cultures of the West. It also generates a more nuanced understanding of Europe and its complex geopolitics. This focus on alternative sites of reception for art and the traffic of artwork and artifacts in and out of Istanbul entails a process of “provincializing Europe.” South Asian historian and postcolonial political theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has characterized this enabling conceptual shift in the following terms: “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought—​which is now everybody’s heritage and which affect us all—​may be renewed from and for the margins.”44 If we substitute European visual language and aesthetic practices for European thought in this passage, we begin to approach what my project addresses—​processes of renewal from and for the margins. In the Ottoman context, however, there were embedded layers of marginality. This book explores the political efficacy of the visual arts for the Ottoman state in their relation to more powerful European empires while simultaneously drawing into the narrative a diverse range of voices within Ottoman culture, including artists from within the minority Christian communities. The case studies in the chapters that follow intersect with, and are indebted to, the varied explorations of regional European Orientalisms from Denmark, Russia, and Poland that have emerged in recent years.45 Although this project maintains a center of gravity in Istanbul as a distinctive site for art’s production and reception, I also hold in view these other contexts when the art in question is situated within international exchange networks. Peripatetic international artists are too often siloed into, or sidelined within, histories of art written exclusively within a single national frame. What also needs to be addressed are frameworks both smaller and larger than the nation-state. An approach that is international in its art-historical vantage and yet attuned to precise forms of exchange allows us to account for patterns of cultural flow and the plural genealogies of production and reception of art in nineteenth-century Istanbul. This book does not attempt to survey the field. Instead I track individual exchange networks across time and space, an approach that is inspired by Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description” as

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a means for disclosing webs of significance, because it is close and deep analysis that allows meaningful insights into the specific circumstances of cultural exchanges.46 Analyzing the work by artists from Central and Eastern Europe and the production and reception of their art in Istanbul, Paris, their countries of origin, and elsewhere across the region requires a more diverse and discontinuous sense of Europe. This entails a focus on Orientalist visual culture in Europe beyond the Franco-British axis that has until recent years governed the field. Scholars in the fields of history, philosophy, and cultural studies debating terms such as Balkanism and nested Orientalisms have recently shed light on the complexity of Orientalism when viewed from the perspective of Mediterranean Europe. Challenging Eurocentrism, Roberto M. Dai­ notto, for example, analyzes intellectual traditions from southern Europe (specifically nineteenth-century Sicilian Orientalism) “not from the outside but from the marginal inside of Europe itself.”47 Maria Todorova has underscored the multiple constructions of difference between western and southeastern Europe by comparing Western Europe’s discourses of Balkanism and Orientalism. Where the latter is grounded in differences between types (between Europe and its others), the former is premised upon differences within Europe itself. Balkanism is premised upon a notion of Europe’s incomplete self, where the region figures as “the structurally despised alter ego” of Western Europe.48 This, she argues, is matched by a Balkan self-image defined against an “Oriental” other. The discourse of Balkanism can also encompass nested Orientalisms, which creates distinctions within the region.49 Milica Bakić-Hayden proposed “nesting Orientalisms” as a term to characterize the multiplicity of embedded distinctions between and within parts of Eastern Europe. The former Yugoslavia was her case study of this phenomena. It is the complexity of these malleable distinctions that Bakić-Hayden argues established the “conditions for its own contradiction.”50 Like Dainotto and Todorova, Iain Chambers’s Mediterranean Crossings entails a “deconstruction of being and becoming Europe.”51 Chambers’s project is positioned within a Derridean and Deleuzian framework that seeks a countermapping of the region by unearthing cultural exchanges across the Mediterranean as poetic riposte to established framings and border marking that are “the materialization of authority.”52 The multiple distinctions within modern Europe and the Mediterranean signal the need for precision in gauging the many constructions of difference inflected by the intersecting geographic, historical, and political complexities of the region. Let me be clear—​t his is not an anti-Saidean argument, nor one that ignores Edward Said’s crucial contribution to the debate through the critical framework he offered in 1978, taken up by art historians in their analysis of Orientalist visual culture from the 1980s onward. I do, however, think that it is crucial to engage with the problems that became evident through the critical reception of his publication, some of which Said himself addressed as he saw certain limitations of the model of cultural analysis he proposed in his early book. It is the Said engaged with reading contrapuntally (he argued for the recognition of a simultaneity of voices that sound against, as well as with, each

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other) that informs my approach to these artistic exchanges in Ottoman Istanbul. It is the Said who continued to think about how patterns of cross-cultural communication (especially through music) are possible while not ignoring the persistence of the discursive and institutional structures of Orientalism.53

NODES AND VEC TORS

Each of the five chapters that follow focuses on what I have identified as key nodes of transcultural exchange through art. This includes forms of patronage and the study of specific genres such as historic battle painting and self-portraiture, as well as the public debates that emerged around exhibitions in Istanbul. Although I emphasize these key nodes, each is an open-ended fragment and a part of larger networks. Royal portraiture was the genre through which the most long-standing Ottoman engagement with European aesthetics took place. The most famous early example is Mehmed the Conqueror’s patronage of the Venetian Renaissance artist, Gentile Bel­ lini.54 By the second half of the nineteenth century there was already a long tradition of diplomatic exchange through royal portraiture that became particularly intense from the late eighteenth century onward, a result of the shift in Ottoman foreign policy toward engagement with Europe. Chapter 1 presents a folio of sultans’ portraits produced by the British printmaker John Young as an exemplar of the interconnected histories of British and Ottoman visual cultures. It was the single most influential codification of the Ottoman dynastic image in the nineteenth century. Entangled within the vicissitudes of international politics, this album, initially conceived as a diplomatic gift commissioned from Young by Sultan Selim III in 1806, was later published in London and dedicated to the Prince of Wales, thus reconfiguring it as a British history of the Ottoman Empire. In a further twist to the plot, these portraits recirculated within a different image economy when reissued as cartes de visite in Istanbul in the 1860s. To date, analyses of Ottoman royal portraiture have charted the iconographic innovations that unfolded across time within this long-standing tradition. Scholars have registered a major shift in the early nineteenth century toward the use of the sultans’ portraits as gifts to European rulers in the context of the Ottoman Empire’s new policy of participation within the European diplomatic arena.55 Challenging a common assumption that imperial imagery has a single point of origin correlating with a unitary and static concept of its audience, this chapter tracks the constellation of forces that acted on a mobile work of art and the different audiences that were marshaled by it as it circulated across cultures over time. It is thus argued that nineteenth-century imperial cultures operated within a transcultural field across which artworks were refigured, cultural boundaries redrawn, and audiences reconstituted. The second chapter triangulates the analysis of Ottoman court patronage of European Orientalists via the Polish artist Stanisław Chlebowski, Sultan Abdülaziz’s court painter in the 1860s and ’70s. Debates about European Orientalism are rendered more

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complex when we address the particular geopolitics surrounding the production and reception of Chlebowski’s work in Istanbul, Paris, and Kraków. In a period when history making was a dominant form of nation and empire building across the globe, Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–​76) utilized the arts to fashion an image of the modernizing state and a triumphant vision of Ottoman history on the battlefield. Through their performative role in state ceremony these images were a visual assertion of the ideals of affiliation the sultan sought to bolster among Istanbul’s Ottoman elite and on the international stage. Bringing together sources in Polish and Turkish archives, this chapter demonstrates that the battle paintings Abdülaziz commissioned were the outcome of a unique, intimate collaboration between the Polish artist and the sultan. What emerges are two distinctive forms of authorship, Sultan Abdülaziz as artist-patron and Chlebowski as a cosmopolitan artist-entrepreneur. The battle painting cycle engages with the format of academic painting to invite an affinity with a triumphal narrative of the Ottomans within European history. This coincided with new approaches to history writing. The paintings created an historical narrative of the empire’s growth and consolidation emphasizing the expansion and defense of its borders in central and southeastern Europe. In the second half of the nineteenth century this narrative was particularly resonant for the Ottomans, when those borders were again in dispute as they strove to prevent territorial losses. The ruler’s input is evident in dozens of red ink sketches and Ottoman inscriptions in several paintings that create a hybrid visual language fusing European conventions of military painting with a text-image format that has its precedent in the Ottoman art of the book. Like the Young Album, the sultan’s sketches circulated between Istanbul and Europe, taking on a new life in these differing contexts for Ottoman and European audiences. They too were peripatetic networked objects. Upon his return to Europe Chlebowski found some commercial success with his Orientalist genre scenes. Given his experience working for the Ottoman court, he was also well placed to contribute to the efflorescence of history painting taking place in Poland. Compositional inversions and substitutions enabled him to depict a number of the same battles he had represented for the sultan, but this time foregrounding Polish heroism and victories against the Ottoman forces. The contemporary political context for their production did not, however, readily affirm Orientalist binary distinctions between Europe and its others that this inversion of European-Ottoman iconography seems to imply. Polish history painting in this period was not underpinned by the politics of territorial imperialism, or even by national sovereignty. Although on Chlebowski’s canvases the Ottomans were represented as Poland’s historic foes, the Ottoman Empire was the only major world power during this period that refused to recognize Poland’s dissolution. Tracing the conjoined history of Chlebowski’s oeuvre in both the European and Ottoman contexts enables a more nuanced understanding of European Orientalist visual culture. Analyzing the unique artistic collaboration between Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz reveals the entangled history of Ottoman and Polish state making and art making in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Focusing on the career trajectories of the first generation of French-trained Ottoman painters, chapter 3 reveals the productive networks that developed between these Ottoman artists and their European mentors. Şeker Ahmed Paşa and Osman Hamdi Bey trained in the studios of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger in Paris in the 1860s.56 By the 1870s, when these Ottoman men had achieved some seniority within the Ottoman bureaucracy, they were hosting Gérôme in Istanbul. This chapter takes us to the heartland of the Orientalism debate through a study of Jean-Léon Gérôme and his networks in Istanbul. Since Linda Nochlin’s landmark critique and the publication of The Snake Charmer on the cover of Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism, Gérôme’s work has come to exemplify the binary logic of the discourse through which Western visual culture produced the East as its other.57 The contemporary interest in collecting Gérôme’s Orientalism by wealthy buyers from the region (particularly the Gulf States) has given pause to reevaluate such a view, but as yet there has been no meaningful historical reassessment of cross-cultural patronage of his art.58 Resituating Gérôme’s work within a broader international reception history, this chapter examines his role in Istanbul’s international networks of pedagogy and Ottoman patronage. Gérôme’s art is reinterpreted in the context of the discerning acquisition of a collection of contemporary European art by Sultan Abdülaziz through the French dealers Goupil et Cie. I argue that the acquisition of Gérôme’s paintings for the Ottoman palace collection reveals the mutable semiotics of his Orientalism. Among an elite Ottoman audience in Istanbul these works were transmuted into Ottoman Orientalism. By tracking the circulation of these paintings from Paris to Istanbul to Paris and then back again, the life of their reprographic doubles, and the variant titles that they accrued as a result of these transitions, my study exposes a complex range of meanings for their divergent audiences. The art exhibitions held in Istanbul in the 1870s and early 1880s are a crucial site for revealing the contested definitions of Ottoman and Orientalist cultural identity. Yet they have been absent from lively debates within the Anglo-American academy about nineteenth-century exhibition culture. In chapter 4 I make the case that exhibitions held in Istanbul should be incorporated as part of an understanding of the nineteenthcentury exhibitionary order.59 Unlike the annual exhibitions at the European art academies and the international exhibitions held around the globe in this period, Istanbul’s art exhibitions were without institutional infrastructure or international profile. But the very cause of their marginality, I argue, is also the source of their revisionary potential. These provisional and loosely structured collaborations encompassed overlapping societies and audiences with a range of agendas and national affiliations. The inclusion of Ottoman artists distinguishes these exhibitions from European societies of Orientalist painting such as the one in France that Roger Benjamin has characterized as “a collectivity authoring Orientalism.”60 The diverse agendas encompassed within these Istanbul exhibitions also distinguishes them from the official Ottoman displays at the European World’s Fairs and Istanbul’s state-sponsored museums

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that Zeynep Çelik, Wendy Shaw, and others have analyzed.61 It is precisely because of the relatively informal and cross-cultural collaborative character of the city’s art exhibitions that they broaden and revise our understanding of nineteenth-century exhibition culture. Drawing them into this debate highlights the limitations of studying nineteenth-century exhibitions as bounded by national traditions. And the study of their fraught critical reception in Istanbul provides unique insights into the varied ways cross-cultural collaboration was imagined, interpreted, and contested. A comparison of these Istanbul reviews with those published in London, Copenhagen, and Tiflis discloses the remnant gossamer threads of intersecting networks within diverse Istanbul communities and the links between them and the art world internationally. At times these networks were divided along the fault lines of national allegiance in response to contemporary political debates, but a study of these exhibitions also reveals the sense of multiple belonging of many of Istanbul’s artists (especially for those who were members of Ottoman minority communities). My final chapter, a comparative study of Ottoman and Orientalist self-portraits created in Istanbul from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, is an exploration of the shifting cross-cultural constructions of artistic identity. During the long reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II cross-cultural artistic encounters were transmuted into new forms of self-fashioning and distinctive definitions of artistic practice through the genre of self-portraiture. This chapter argues that through this genre Istanbul’s Ottoman and expatriate artists grappled with the ontological challenge of being an easel painter in the Ottoman capital. What resulted were intriguing paintings that offer intimate insights into how this generation perceived themselves and their practice as modern artists in a period and a location where this cultural category was in formation. The complexity and diversity of these self-portraits is striking. Some are declarations of professional identity, some promise to reveal psychological interiority, while others engage the phenomenological conundrum of painting a self-portrait. Among them are the first self-conscious statements of modern Ottoman artistic identity that reveal processes of translation and synthesis between Ottoman and European visual languages. These range from Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s appropriation of French academic portrait conventions, which are given a distinctively Ottoman inflection in his self-representation as an Ottoman gentlemanartist, to Osman Hamdi Bey’s allegory of contemporary Ottoman painting as an intersection between Ottoman and European aesthetic traditions, and later to Avni Lifij’s bold self-styling as a transgressive bohemian in the early years of the twentieth century. These processes of artistic self-definition were part of an ongoing dialogue within Ottoman culture on the value of engagement with the West and Ottoman debates about masculinity. In this chapter it is argued that these self-portraits are of enduring interest to postcolonial histories of nineteenth-century art because their cross-cultural aesthetics has recourse to the simultaneous reinvention of both foreign and local forms. At the same time Ottoman artists were refashioning their artistic identity through an engagement with European culture, the authority of Istanbul’s European resident art-

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ists was premised upon their identification with Ottoman society. In the self-portraits of the Italian Fausto Zonaro, for example, status was established through the prestige of his appointment as painter to the Ottoman palace, and he embedded his self-image within Ottoman rituals of statecraft. This long-term Istanbul resident was particularly inventive in his engagement with self-portraiture, also representing himself immersed in Sufi religious ritual, and thus projecting, I argue, a fantasy of social inclusion by denoting himself as a cultural initiate rather than a casual visitor or tourist. Within the study of European Orientalist visual culture both portrait painting and photographic portraiture are familiar modes for affirming and celebrating the mastery of the European Orientalist.62 Complicating this received view by introducing Ottoman self-portraits into the debate, this final chapter also brings to light Orientalist self-portraits that resist this characterization of artistic identity as articulated exclusively through power over cultures of the Near and Middle East. It does so by analyzing self-representations that are premised upon identification with Ottoman society and are a testimony to the sultan’s effectiveness in securing the allegiance of European artists. Self-portraiture, a category of representation where painter, subject, and viewer are co-implicated, and in which reflections on the very processes of art making are central, is a particularly revealing site from which to address this book’s central concern with artistic exchange.

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1 OTTOMAN IMPERIAL PORTRAITURE AND TRANSCULTURAL AESTHETICS

In his book Other Colors, Orhan Pamuk invokes the early twentieth-century Turkish poet Yahya Kemal’s response to Gentile Bellini’s 1480 portrait, Sultan Mehmed II (fig. 4). It is a painting, Pamuk notes, that has achieved iconic status as a symbol of the Ottoman sultanate in modern Turkish culture. Pamuk writes, “what troubled him was that the hand that drew the portrait lacked a nationalist motive.”1 In Kemal’s work, Pamuk finds an approach to the Ottoman past that is riven with the doubts of a Turkish writer struggling to position that history as part of a national cultural identity in the early years of the Turkish Republic. Not least among the challenges for both authors grappling with the connection between Ottoman portraiture and contemporary cultural identity is the fact that the past, like the present, was ineluctably forged through an engagement with European aesthetics.2 Yet what also emerges from Pamuk’s short response to this painting, and the constellation of other portraits by Ottoman and Persian artists that were inspired by it, is the prospect of an alternative, more enabling engagement with this history of transculturation. The uncertain authorship of some of these paintings and the alternative readings they provoke for Pamuk as he entertains their attribution on each side of the East-West divide, for example, function for him as a reminder that “cultural influences work in both directions with complexities difficult to fathom.”3 Pamuk’s eloquent, ambivalent response to the legacy of the Ottoman engagement with Venetian Renaissance art is a provocation to my own study of British artists’ portraits of the Ottoman sultans in the nineteenth century. Pamuk’s evocation of Yahya Kemal’s profound misgivings encapsulates the risks associated with cross-cultural

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Figure 4. Gentile Bellini, Sultan Mehmed II, 1480. Oil on canvas, 69.9 × 52.1 cm. © The National Gallery, London.

patronal transactions. The confluence of differing investments in the portrait process by patron and artist and the complex history of the painting’s later reception encapsulate the ways in which the work of art is potentially vulnerable to contrary purposes. One of the challenges that this chapter engages is how to theorize the shifting spatial and temporal articulations of such discrepant iterations. Among many portraits of the Ottoman sultans commissioned from foreign artists throughout the nineteenth century, one of the most influential was the folio that incorporated portraits of the sultans from the founding of the dynasty to the reign of Mahmud II, published in 1815 and known as the Young Album.4 It is a particularly provocative case study of transculturation because of its intriguing, contested history. Both the circumstances of this album’s initial commission and its subsequent and repeated repurposings as it shuttled back and forth between Istanbul and London throughout the nineteenth century make it a compelling example of the contrary purposes to which the

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sultans’ portraits were deployed. It is precisely because of the mobility and interpretive mutability of this album that this case study provides a productive site from which to engage broader issues about how to theorize the artwork produced as a result of crosscultural contact and how to assess what happens to cultural boundaries through such mobility. The Young Album did not simply reflect the imperial interests of the commissioning sultan nor of the British printmaker; instead it represented a range of interests and addressed different audiences as it shifted across time and space. The challenge is how to account for the historical mutability of boundary formation as this artwork gathered different audiences at different historical moments. How are the various cultural allegiances of both artist and patron inscribed within a portrait study of a foreign ruler? How are cultural boundaries articulated within such images whose formation is transacted across cultures? And what theoretical models of boundary formation are applicable here? Anthropologist Nancy Munn’s phenomenological approach to border theorization has been particularly resonant for me in conceptualizing these processes. Although her approach was developed in the very different domain of contemporary Australian Aboriginal Warlpiri culture, Munn’s emphasis on the mutability of space and time in the processes of boundary formation offers a model that has explanatory resonance with the Young Album. Munn analyzes the processes of boundary formation in Warlpiri culture where ancestral law imposes spatial limitations on designated individuals. Her phenomenological interpretation of the Warlpiri “Law truck” is a particularly compelling example of the spatio-temporal complexities of this mobile boundary formation. In Warlpiri society, the “Law truck” is the vehicle designated to carry key people in a ritual performance. During the time this truck is on the road, it is a mobile center of power, defining, as Munn characterizes it, “different excluded regions in its immediate vicinity at any given moment.”5 This power extends beyond the “immediate moving field” of the vehicle, affecting the whole route, thereby “carrying the power of boundary making with it” and projecting “temporary mobile signifiers of its delimiting powers onto the spatiocorporeal fields of others.”6 During these journeys the Law truck both establishes boundaries through zones of exclusion for those community members who are not within the vehicle and simultaneously brings all the people in the “affected regions” into a temporarily “imagined community” of “common, excluded travel space, a unitary spacetime.” 7 Nancy Munn’s model of the “Law truck” underscores spatially and temporally provisional processes of boundary formation organized around a mobile, temporary center of power, whereby boundaries are renegotiated through the processes that both separate and connect individuals involved in this cultural ritual. An engagement with this model enables a theorization of the implications of the mobility of Ottoman royal portraits in the nineteenth century. To date, analyses of Ottoman royal portraiture have charted the iconographic innovations that unfolded across time within this long-standing tradition. So, too, scholars have investigated the differing audiences for these works, in particular

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registering a major shift toward the use of the sultans’ portraits as gifts to European rulers in the context of the Ottoman Empire’s new policy of participation within the European diplomatic arena in the late eighteenth century.8 An engagement with Munn’s model can augment such analyses by enabling us to attend to ways in which distinctive interpretations of the artwork are hinged to its physical mobility, its affective power to gather its audience, and how the contingencies of boundary-marking processes that operate within and between artwork and audience differentially constitute and position that audience. Yet this model resists direct transposition because of the differences between contexts. Munn’s interpretation is derived from a relatively stable system that operates effectively because of a shared understanding of ritual meanings within the culture she is addressing. The Young Album presents a much more fractured history where the object itself is profoundly reconfigured across cultures over time; consequently boundaries are renegotiated between divided centers of power in Britain and the Ottoman Empire. Notwithstanding these significant differences in context, this model can be usefully adapted to interpret the complex intrication of diverse motivations and allegiances and the spatio-temporal complexities of cross-cultural boundary formation in the protracted production and reception of the Young Album.

B E T W E E N I S TA N B U L A N D L O N D O N

In 1806 the British printmaker John Young was approached by Mr. Green from the Levant Company to undertake a most unusual commission—​a series of twenty-eight mezzotint prints, portraits of the Ottoman sultans from the founding of the empire up to the present day. His client was the reigning Ottoman ruler, Sultan Selim III, and although he did not deal directly with the Ottoman leader, it was clear that the sultan was the project’s guiding force. Young received instructions that a limited number of prints were to be taken from his plates and “every possible secrecy was to be observed during the progress of the work.” None of the final prints were to be kept by Young and “the pictures were, on no account, to be exhibited publicly or privately.” In order to ensure this, “the plates, when finished and printed, were to be given up to the [sultan’s] agent.”9 These interdictions temporarily established the album’s production as a process issuing from the delimiting power of the Ottoman sultan, incorporating the work of the British printmaker within the boundaries of Ottoman culture. In accepting this commission Young worked from the gouache portraits by an Ottoman-Greek, Kostantin Kapıdağlı, that were supplied to him by the Ottoman palace, and he was instructed to submit a sample of his work for the sultan’s approval before beginning the larger project. As the appointed mezzotint engraver to the Prince of Wales, Young was no doubt used to powerful clients with exacting demands, but this was a particularly exotic commission coming from inside the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and circumscribed by such conditions of secrecy. Young duly submitted the print and

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Figure 5. John Young, Sultan Othman Khan I: Head of the Ottoman Imperial House (Sultan Othman—​K han Ier. Chef de la Maison Imp. Othomane). Plate 1 from A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey. . . . With a Biographical Account of Each of the Emperors (London: W. Bulmer, 1815). Hand-colored mezzotint, 38 × 26 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (Folio B N 12).

engraved plate of the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, Osman I. Both plate and print remain in the Topkapı Palace collection. Once they were received, the approval of the sultan was granted, and Young proceeded to make the other plates (fig. 5). For Sultan Selim III this project was part of a new initiative. Although by no means the first Ottoman sultan to present his portrait to a European ruler, he was the first to integrate the European convention of the diplomatic exchange of portraits with an extensive program of reform and a new foreign policy of sustained engagement with the major European powers. The Young Album was the second such project in which Selim III utilized print technology to disseminate his representation abroad.10 The first was a single portrait of the sultan also painted by Kostantin Kapıdağlı and engraved in London by Luigi Schiavonetti in 1793 (fig. 6). Within the vignette beneath the sultan’s portrait is

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Figure 6. Luigi Schiavonetti (after Kostantin Kapıdağlı), Sultan Selim III, c. 1793. Stipple engraving printed in black, brown, red, and blue, 40.6 × 25.8 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

a view of the Tophane Barracks that symbolizes his military reforms of 1791–​92. This format was intended to be presented to Ottoman statesmen as well as European ambassadors and monarchs.11 The version of this print presented by the painter, Kapıdağlı, to the sultan himself and now held in the Topkapı Palace archives is encased in a binding decorated with the empire’s holy cities, Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, and its former and present capitals, Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul. Thus the sultan’s agenda of military reform, designed to ensure the maintenance of the empire’s territorial integrity, is framed and authorized by geographic signifiers of his dual political and religious roles as sultan and caliph. This solo portrait and the Young Album were part of Selim III’s broader initiatives to open up channels of communication with Europe and to end the long-standing policy

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of isolationism that until the late eighteenth century had characterized the Ottoman approach to foreign policy.12 A key step was establishing permanent Ottoman embassies in Europe, with the first opened in London in 1793.13 Selim III was a reformer who relied on traditional solutions to strengthen the central power of the Ottoman state; in this regard his approach was characteristic of the reform agendas of various sultans since the mid-seventeenth century. And yet he was also a transitional figure, a precursor to the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reform process because of his willingness to engage with European practices and to consult with European advisers about these reforms.14 His portrait album project is itself a transitional form. This project celebrating the dynasty with representations of its successive rulers is situated within a centuries-old tradition of Ottoman imperial portrait albums.15 Court historian Lokman’s Kıyâfetü’linsaniye fî Şemâ’il’ül-Osmaniye (Human Physiognomy Concerning the Personal Dispositions of the Ottomans, 1579), the best known of these early portrait albums, contained twelve dynastic portraits by Üstad Osman and Nakkaş Ali. It was created in a particularly energetic period of production of illustrated Ottoman histories. Scholars of early modern Ottoman art have demonstrated the complex visual sources for these albums. They assimilated and translated Persian, European, and earlier Ottoman precedents to consolidate an image of the sultanate that exerted a strong influence over subsequent Ottoman dynastic imagery.16 Kostantin Kapıdağlı’s portraits, on which Young’s engravings are based, are situated within this long-standing court tradition; its portrait iconography draws on earlier Ottoman precedents. For instance, the physiognomy and clothing particularly of the earlier sultans relies on eighteenth-century miniature precedents, in particular Levnî’s Kebir Musavver Silsilenâme, 1703–​30.17 Yet, as Günsel Renda demonstrates, Kapıdağlı introduces European portrait conventions in features such as the standing, rather than traditional seated, enthroned pose. He also introduces the vignettes beneath each portrait, which signal the prestige of the respective sultans through symbolic reference to their achievements, either great military victories or contributions to public life. This was a diplomatic gift with a message; a historiographic narrative of the Ottoman Empire is presented through these vignettes. The first group of portraits represent the consolidation of the dynasty through military triumphs in the empire’s expansionary stage. The major territorial gains are represented in the vignettes of their respective sultans. The last three of Kapıdağlı’s portraits shift away from this emphasis on territorial conquest, presenting instead the military reform agendas of Mustafa III (r. 1757–​74), Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–​89), and Selim III (r. 1789–​1807) through symbols of worldly knowledge and scientific inquiry, edifices of naval pedagogical innovation, and military dress reform in their respective vignettes. In the vignette that accompanies the portrait of Mustafa III (fig. 7), the telescope, globe, and books (in all likelihood a reference to the school of Naval Engineering that Mustafa III established in the naval arsenal in 1773)18 sit on and protrude beyond the boundaries of the vignette’s border, casting their shadows on this platform and creating a trompe l’oeil effect that demonstrates a sophisticated

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Figure 7. John Young, Sultan Mustapha Khan III: Twenty-sixth Ottoman Emperor (Sultan Mustapha Khan IIIme. Vingt Sixième Empereur Othoman). Plate 27 from A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . . With a Biographical Account of Each of the Emperors (London: W. Bulmer, 1815). Hand-colored mezzotint, 38 × 26 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (Folio B N 12).

grasp of Western perspectival conventions in a particularly bold statement of military, aesthetic, and iconographic innovation. Similarly the Laleli Mosque depicted inside this vignette is an early example of Ottoman baroque architecture, a fusion of traditional Islamic forms and Western architectural motifs. In the portrait of his successor, Abdülhamid I (fig. 8), the orderly façade of the Mühendishane-i Bahr-i Hümâyun (Imperial Naval Engineering School) fronted by the strict geometry of its parterre garden finds its visual parallel in the windowed façade of the mosque to the left. The architectural harmony of military and religious establishments is reiterated by the solitary cypress paralleling the mosque’s solo minaret. The reference to military reform is reiterated in the foreground of Selim III’s vignette (fig. 9), where an orderly row of the sultan’s New Order troops, the linchpin of his controversial military reform strategy, are immediately

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Figure 8. John Young, Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan: Twenty-seventh Ottoman Emperor (Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan. Vingt Septième Empereur Othoman). Plate 28 from A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . . With a Biographical Account of Each of the Emperors (London: W. Bulmer, 1815). Hand-colored mezzotint, 38 × 26 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (Folio B N 12).

distinguishable by their new European-style uniforms. A parallel row of docked naval vessels are depicted on the other side of the Golden Horn near the recently renovated naval arsenal. These three portraits assembled in chronological succession in the album signify a sustained period of reform and register the most recent sultans’ responsiveness to the challenges facing the Ottoman Empire in this later period. The portraits that precede them locate this challenge in relation to a glorious Ottoman past.19 Selim III’s initiatives in the sphere of foreign relations set a pattern for the century ahead, one that can be characterized by intense processes of diplomatic maneuver and countermaneuver. As Şükrü Hanioğlu has argued, in the face of declining Ottoman strength and recognition of the superior force of European powers, the art of diplomacy and shoring up strategic alliances became a crucial tool for securing the empire’s

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Figure 9. John Young, Sultan Selim Khan III: Twenty-eighth Ottoman Emperor (Sultan Selim Khan IIIme. Vingt Huitième Empereur Othoman). Plate 29 from A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . . With a Biographical Account of Each of the Emperors (London: W. Bulmer, 1815). Hand-colored mezzotint, 38 × 26 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (Folio B N 12).

future. Bonaparte’s attack on Egypt in 1798, for example, which destroyed Selim III’s efforts to conclude a Franco-Ottoman alliance, instead necessitated temporary alliances with Russia and Great Britain. This event, as Hanioğlu argues, underscored that “in order to survive [the Ottoman state] would have to harness European power and turn it against any potential attacker.”20 I would argue that diplomacy, with its emphasis on negotiation, move, and countermove, is also an important model for the role of Ottoman visual culture in this context. These images were tools in what Richard Sennett refers to as the “soft power” of international diplomacy.21 This is particularly applicable to the sultans’ portraits in a period when they were deployed by the Ottomans within this political sphere. For example, 1806 and 1807 were particularly dynamic years for such portrait exchanges between

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the Ottoman Empire and France as the two countries reforged alliances.22 Engagement in diplomatic alliances assumes some mutual ground that makes negotiation possible, a playing field on which those parties involved are seeking to gain strategic advantage, and / or a willingness to find mutually accepted solutions to a common challenge. In the case of the Ottomans throughout the nineteenth century, alliances, primarily with Britain and France, shifted dramatically as the balance of power was renegotiated. Such alliances were underpinned by a shared interest in maintaining the Ottoman Empire, albeit prompted by very different motivations for each of the parties. For the Ottomans such strategic alliances often came with conditions attached in the shape of “demand[s] for administrative reform, often with the aim of improving the status of the Empire’s Christian subjects.”23 The regular shuttling of portrait gifts between the Ottoman Empire and Europe in this era of diplomacy, I would argue, was part of this process of response and counterresponse, achievement and setback. The assumed mutual ground here was the language of honorific portraiture with its rhetorical aggrandizement of the respective rulers. The initial purpose of the Young Album lent an historical dimension to this aggrandizement, enshrining the legitimacy of the reigning sultan by asserting the longevity of this powerful dynasty. So, too, the reform agenda represented in the vignettes accompanying the portraits of the most recent Ottoman sultans, a clear statement of the state’s embrace of a modernizing imperative, directly asserts a common purpose with the European states. Thinking about these portraits in terms of the dynamics of diplomacy focuses attention not just on the individual gesture of a particular portrait’s iconography but emphasizes the ways in which meaning is generated and renegotiated through the life of these images, highlighting the ritual function of these portraits. Given this, it is highly significant that despite the intention of its commissioner Selim III, the Young Album was never to fulfill its purpose as a gift to foreign powers. As a tool of diplomatic negotiation, the album was set aside, and due to internal political struggles it was not completed during Selim III’s lifetime. Yet this album is all the more intriguing for its history of thwarted purpose and redeployment. Selim III’s reforms of the Ottoman defense forces were met with staunch opposition from the conservative corps of Janissaries, whose rebellion against the sultan in 1807 was openly supported by the Ulema (religious scholars).24 These powerful opponents of reform were ultimately responsible for the sultan’s deposition. The Young Album became caught up in these political events. John Young was still working on the prints in London when Sultan Selim III was deposed in 1807. These circumstances created a dilemma for the printmaker, who had already made a considerable investment of time and resources in this costly deluxe print folio.25 It was not until 1815 that the project was completed with the imprimatur of “the agents of the Turkish government” in London.26 By this time its purpose was reconfigured. In order for the printmaker to recoup his costs, the album was now to be released commercially within Britain. The resulting albums reflect Young’s dual intentions in these new circumstances.

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Multiple copies were delivered to Sultan Mahmud II and eighty of them remain in the Topkapı Palace archives in Istanbul.27 In the version sold in Britain, the portraits were augmented with text. In a canny bit of marketing, Young realized that the vicissitudes of the commission itself would be of interest to his British audience and so he included them in his preface to the volume. Young’s story of working for the sultan under these stringent conditions, the veils of secrecy, and the opaque network of access to his patron added to the album’s appeal. Through Young’s inclusion of this frame story the balance of authorship and authority shifts and, to invoke Nancy Munn’s term, its “center of power” is reconfigured. In the Topkapı versions as originally intended, the sultans alone are foregrounded. The portraits are not signed by either artist or printmaker. In the versions sold in London, through Young’s insertion of himself as author and subject of the tale in his preface, the sultanate is no longer solely at the album’s center. Previously Young’s work on this project was positioned within the boundaries of Ottoman culture, as he temporarily and at a distance worked in the service of the sultanate, whereas in the later reconfigured project, through Young’s preface, the authorship and authority of the printmaker is asserted, and he emerges as a parallel figure through the narrative of his adventure in bringing this project to fruition. Young even took the liberty of dedicating his work to a member of another royal household, his British patron, the Prince Regent.28 In an effort to bring the project up to date, Young included portraits of Selim III’s two successors, Mustafa IV (r. 1807–​8) and Mahmud II (r. 1808–​39) (fig. 10). The visual continuity of the project is interrupted by these two images of the later sultans. It is unclear how Young obtained these portraits. Whatever the source, this visual discontinuity within the album speaks to the disrupted history of its production, a caesura in the coherence of the original commission. Young also inserted an abbreviated history of the Ottoman Empire in his souvenir albums, adding short accounts of each sultan next to their portraits, an inclusion that rewrites the historiographic narrative of the original commission. The symbolism of the vignettes under each of the portraits that were created by Kapıdağlı and approved by Selim III construct a visual history through symbolism that is suited to the function of a diplomatic gift; celebratory in tone, they visually narrate each sultan’s achievements. Young’s short histories of the sultans, by contrast, present a very different narrative reflecting a contemporary British approach to the history of the Ottoman Empire.29 The individual histories of the last three sultans in particular are revealing in terms of a British historiography of the Ottoman Empire, confirming a trajectory of decline premised on inept, corrupt, or thwarted leadership. Compare, for instance, the portrait of Mustafa III with its visual symbols of erudition and the following excerpt from Young’s appended text: “There is little to remark in the character of Mustapha. The misfortunes of the empire appear to have been accelerated, not more by the inefficiency of the government, than from the indolence and inability of the Sultan; who seems to have been totally destitute of political talents.”30 Although Young’s former patron, Selim III,

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Figure 10. John Young, Sultan Mahmoud Khan II: Thirtieth Ottoman Emperor (Sultan Mahmoud Khan IInd [sic.]. Trentième Empereur Othoman). Plate 31 from A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . . With a Biographical Account of Each of the Emperors (London: W. Bulmer, 1815). Handcolored mezzotint, 38 × 26 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (Folio B N 12).

was judged more favorably in terms of his character attributes, according to Young he was “surrounded by weak or treacherous advisers” and ultimately fell victim to the Janissaries’ “appetite for vengeance.” Lamenting his original patron’s demise, the British author concludes this account with an affirmative but patronizing statement about the empire’s immanent cultural assimilation in the hands of the reigning Sultan Mahmud II. Young writes that “the munificence and taste of the present Emperor will, probably, render the period not far distant, in which Turkey will emulate the most enlightened states of Europe.”31 It is clear from Young’s text that this hope for the arrest of the Ottoman Empire’s decline is premised on the assumption of its subsidiary relation (i.e., that

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it no longer posed a military threat) and submission to the stronger European states, especially Britain. In this version of the Young Album sold in London in 1815, the combination of Young’s British history of the Ottoman sultanate, his frame story about the project’s history, and the British royal dedication combined to ensure that the album was now organized around a different center of power. The British authorial subject emerges in tandem with a historiographic narrative that asserts a trajectory of the Ottoman Empire’s benign assimilation to European culture and interests. In doing so the British author inscribes Ottoman history for his British audience, thereby bringing it within the realms of a different “imagined community.” This history of the physical and semantic mobility of this portrait series did not, however, end with its publication in London. Although there is no record of its distribution as a gift to foreign rulers, the versions sent to Istanbul did not simply languish in the sultans’ storerooms. The Kapıdağlı portraits and textless versions of the Young Album currently in the Topkapı Palace archives became one of the most frequently referenced sources for later nineteenth-century portrait series. Just as Young had customized the original commission by adding portraits of the two successors to his original patron Selim III to the version he eventually published in 1815, so too one of the albums in the Ottoman palace collection continued to be customized. This time it was augmented and supplemented by the officially sanctioned photographic and print portraits of the subsequent sultans. One of the most remarkable chapters in the album’s later history was the reproduction of its portrait pages as cartes de visite (fig. 11) first produced by the Ottoman-Armenian photographers, the Abdullah Frères, in the early 1860s (most likely in 1862 when their availability for sale in the firm’s Pera studio was announced in the local Ottoman newspaper Tercüman-ı Ahval).32 In this context the Young Album entered yet another image economy when an alternative context for its reception emerged as a result of its reproduction in the cheaper carte de visite format. This brought it within the reach of wider local and foreign audiences in Istanbul. Their continuing interest for these audiences is suggested by the studio trademark on the back of a number of these cartes that indicates they continued to be released during the period when the photographic studio was appointed as the official photographers to the Ottoman palace.33 Whether or not the sultan directly approved this production run is unknown; however, it is unlikely that the photographic studio would have proceeded without at least an understanding that this would have received the tacit support of the palace, considering that any offense in those quarters was a highly risky undertaking for their business interests in the Ottoman capital.34 Unlike the London version of the album, these cartes de visite are divested of their text. But they also differ from the albums held in the Topkapı Palace archives. Miniaturized and reproduced without the clarity of the large mezzotint format, the symbolism conveyed through the vignettes is barely legible in these cartes de visite. Given the

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Figure 11. Abdullah Frères, Cartes-de-visite of the Young Album, n.d. Each carte approx. 9.7 × 6.3 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14).

affordability of these cartes, they were within the reach of a much wider audience than either the deluxe mezzotint albums that Young sold in Britain in 1815 or the versions secluded in the sultan’s collection. Although the provenance of the Young Album cartes de visite in the Getty Research Institute’s Gigord collection are unknown, the signs of handling, the wear and tear on their surfaces, the fading, the black stain marks, and especially the pinholes are enigmatic indices of their history of display and robust use before they entered the archives. Untethered from the luxury book format, they invite a very different, informal physical engagement. For an Ottoman audience these portable,

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scaled-down photographic images of the dynasty offered their owners a more intimate access to their heritage. The imprecision in our ability to account for the circulation of these cartes de visite prior to their entry into these collections is a testament to the openness and mutability of boundary-marking processes.

BOUNDARY MARKING AND HIS TORY MAKING

In this chapter I have focused on the Young Album as a case study of the intersecting histories of nineteenth-century British and Ottoman visual cultures. Competing historiographies of the Ottoman Empire were produced through the intertwined, trans­ imperial production and reception of this portrait series. What is foregrounded here is not a peripheral zone of cultural contact that is remote from an imperial center, but instead an artwork moving back and forth between two imperial capitals, London and Istanbul, across the East-West divide. Analyzing the particular history of this work of art traversing these geographical vectors reconstitutes the “imaginative geography” of nineteenth-century imperial cultures as a transcultural field across which artworks are refigured, cultural boundaries redrawn, and audiences reconstituted. In recent years, postcolonial cultural and visual theorists have developed a range of models and metaphors for thinking about processes of transculturation and crosscultural contact.35 In this chapter I have invoked anthropologist Nancy Munn’s phenomenological analysis of Australian Aboriginal Warlpiri cultural ritual and transposed it to an interpretation of Ottoman-British cross-cultural contact through the visual arts. Munn’s focus on culture as a field of action, in particular her interpretation of the Walpiri Law truck as a mobile center of power, emphasizes the mutability of boundary formation across time and space. This is an effective way of thinking about how the processes of cultural contact between the Ottoman and British empires were enacted through the Young Album. Rather than imputing the work of art as having a single point of origin that correlates with a unitary and static concept of its audience (as is often assumed in the study of imperial cultures), adapting Munn’s approach enables us to conceptualize a constellation of forces that acted on the temporally and spatially mobile work of art and the different audiences that were marshaled by it as it moved between London and Istanbul. This approach highlights cross-cultural connections as forms of permeable and renegotiable boundary formation within and between artworks and audiences, enabling a focus on how the processes of connection operate through visual culture in the “connected world of empires.”36 This is not a utopian claim about mutable cultural boundaries, nor is it an argument about subaltern agency. My case study addresses the pragmatics of elite visual culture that is brought into the service of political negotiation. This study is embedded within the complex and shifting geopolitics of the noncolonized Ottoman state adapting inherited and imported aesthetic conventions of honorific portraiture within the era of global British and French imperial ascendancy. A model that emphasizes the negotiated poli-

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tics of international diplomacy is particularly apt for conceptualizing the initial purpose of the Young Album and the role of Ottoman visual culture in this international arena. My contention, however, is that the Young Album was a divided object. From the very beginning it was intended for a European audience, but through the historical circumstances of its production a significant difference emerges between its original purpose as a gift in the context of diplomatic exchange relations and the alternative purpose it acquired in 1815, as an independently marketed album of historical curiosity for a broader British audience. It was yet again reconfigured when reissued as cartes de visite by the Abdullah Frères photographic studio in Istanbul, offering both local and foreign audiences intimate access to Ottoman history. As part of this historical mobility there were multiple shifts in its image economy: from gift culture to consumer culture and from luxury album to intimate cartes de visite. In these different iterations the characters of the sultans were variously co-opted for Ottoman and British Orientalist versions of the empire’s character and its history. These shifts occur through time and space, encompassing the celebration of different subjects and histories. Through processes of supplementation with additional text and images rupturing the aesthetic coherence of the original commission, the cultural boundaries of the work of art were redrawn, divergent centers of power were imputed, different forms of authorship were claimed, conflicting ways of authoring Ottoman history were inscribed, and alternate audiences were engaged. Through this durational case study, cultural encounter emerges as a procedure entailing multiple transformations and multiple local effects. To return to the framing device for this chapter, Yahya Kemal’s misgivings about the foreign artist whose hand “lacked a nationalist motive” is borne out in the vicissitudes of the Young Album. As it turned out, the British artist was by no means simply a hired hand for the articulation of the Ottoman sultans’ identity and history. Distinctions between text and image enabled the later reappropriation of this volume for the self-aggrandizement of the British artist and his monarch. Yet the continuing legacy of the album within Ottoman culture ensured the various ways this album could be further redeployed for the purposes of celebrating Ottoman history through its venerable dynastic lineage, and thereby the album in its various reincarnations became a resource for imagining Ottoman futures.

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2 THE BATTLEFIELD OF OTTOMAN HISTORY

On a page of the Czaykowska album in the National Museum in Kraków, the thick cardboard mounts of two cartes de visite abut the assured markings of a red ink sketch of the Ottoman fleet (fig. 12). The carte on the right, affectionately inscribed to the album’s creator by the subject of the portrait, the Polish artist Stanisław Chlebowski, is an intimate token of friendship. Like this photograph, the sketch in the center was a gift to Czaykowska from Chlebowski, but the conjunction of image and text on this page is at pains to commemorate something more than personal friendship. The carte de visite on the left, as the caption beneath declares, is a photograph of Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz, a cropped version of the official portrait taken by the Ottoman-Armenian firm Abdullah Frères and first released onto the market in 1863 (the year after the Young Album cartes had been issued by the same firm). Abdülaziz was the first Ottoman sultan to embrace this modern medium of photography to disseminate his image both within the empire and abroad. This is but one example of his enthusiastic patronage of the visual arts as a tool of imperial promotion. The handwritten caption underneath Chlebowski’s photograph indicates that he too was part of Abdülaziz’s patronal network. It states: “Stanisław Chlebowski the Sultan’s court painter.” Two forms of indexicality are brought together on this album page to reveal to the viewer valuable evidence of this unique cross-cultural artistic encounter between artist and patron: the concrete immediacy of the two photographic portraits augment the fluid spontaneity of the red ink drawing that they frame. The heads of both men angled slightly in the direction of the sketch in the center reinforce this framing connection. Czaykowska’s caption,

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Figure 12. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman Fleet, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper affixed on page 12 of the Czaykowska album, 19.2 × 23.3 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a.-6689. (Left: Abdullah Frères, Sultan Abdülaziz, carte de visite. Center: Sultan Abdülaziz, Turkish Fleet, red ink on paper. Right: A. Szubert, Stanisław Chlebowski, carte de visite.)

written in her shaky hand directly onto the paper of the sketch itself (as if to make sure the album’s viewer does not miss the point of her page’s narrative), insistently declares that this work of art is not by the Polish artist, but was drawn for him by his patron, the sultan himself.1 In 1895 Seweryna Szembek Czaykowska donated this album to the National Museum in Kraków, and eight decades later a much larger cache of the sultan’s sketches that had been in the possession of Chlebowski’s sister after his death came to rest in the same archive. This chapter seeks to put these sketches back into circulation, tracing their journey in order to excavate their former visual worlds in Istanbul and Poland and thereby tracking their connotative transformations from working drawings, to foreign curiosities, to works of art. Their movement went hand in hand with an address to new audiences as they were recast in each new context. Through a process of reconstructing Chlebowski’s first commissioned Ottoman group portraits from their remnant preliminary sketches in Warsaw and reconnecting the sultan’s Kraków sketches to their

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related paintings currently housed in the Dolmabahçe Palace Museum and the Military Museum in Istanbul, this study reveals that Chlebowski’s projects for the palace were created through an Ottoman patronal network rather than emerging from the agency of a single actor. While the sultan was a creative interlocutor and the ultimate arbiter of this regal imagery he was not its sole instigator. Up until his death in 1869, the powerful statesman Fuad Paşa was a linchpin within this web of patronage that aligned contemporary regal portraiture with a grand narrative of Ottoman history as a bulwark for the struggling empire. What makes the sultan’s sketches of enduring interest is not just their role in late Tanzimat Ottoman visual culture but also their life beyond this period. Chlebowski took them with him when he left Istanbul for Paris in 1876. Given his experience working for the Ottoman court, of which they were concrete proof, Chlebowski was well placed to contribute to the urgent nationalist project of Polish history painting that preoccupied both local and expatriate Polish artists during this century of foreign occupation of their country. Thus emerged the intriguing fact of Chlebowski’s dual role in nineteenthcentury Ottoman and Polish history making. Untethered from their role as instructive drawings for the Ottoman historic battle series, in Poland and England the sultan’s sketches were variously construed as curious tokens of a Muslim ruler’s talent for figural representation and evidence of a unique Ottoman-Polish artistic collaboration. Like the Young Album they later returned to Istanbul via modern reprographic technologies, taking on new life as they inspired a generation of Ottoman artists in the early twentieth century. They too were peripatetic, networked objects.

A F F I L I AT I O N : T H E F UA D PA Ş A C O M M I S S I O N

Two early commissions demonstrate how instrumental the Grand Vezier Fuad Paşa was in collaborating with the sultan to create the image of the modern sultanate in the 1860s. It was Fuad Paşa who had introduced the photographic firm Abdullah Frères to the sultan in 1863 after an unsuccessful sitting with another local firm.2 Widely circulated in their day, photographs that resulted from this and later sittings remain the best-known images of Sultan Abdülaziz. His contemporary military dress uniform and the choice to engage with the medium of photography signified the modernity of the Ottoman head of state. Equally significant in Ottoman palace circles, but less well known in the literature on Abdülaziz’s image making in the early 1860s, are four paintings of the sultan and his military elites commissioned by Fuad Paşa from Stanisław Chlebowski a year after the sultan’s first photographic portrait.3 The installation of these portraits at the time of the inauguration of the sultan’s Beylerbeyi Palace demonstrates how important group portraiture was within Ottoman state ceremonies during the early years of his reign. Chlebowski traveled to Istanbul in 1864 at the behest of Fuad Paşa. He was invited to join the Ottoman army encamped near Istanbul upon his arrival, and from there he

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Figure 13. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 16 from Chlebowski’s Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864. Pencil on paper, 22 × 29.6 cm. Photographer: Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005 / 16.

was to undertake field studies for a group portrait commission.4 The two oil sketches he produced were examined by Fuad and others at the camp and later shown to Abdülaziz, who approved the commission. While the four final paintings resulting from this commission are unlocated, in my view a sketchbook in the National Museum in Warsaw contains many of the preliminary drawings.5 Comparing these field studies and three related documents about the paintings enables us to reconstruct their process of production and to establish their contemporary significance.6 The first painting included more than fifty portraits of the sultan, his son, and nephew among senior Ottoman political, naval, and military figures.7 Five pages of the Warsaw sketchbook are dedicated to careful portrait studies of some of these individuals. Beneath each portrait sketch are the name and rank delineated in a hand that is so proficient in the cursive Ottoman script that it is evidently not that of Chlebowski (fig. 13). The page that follows the portraits displays a ten-figure diagram with names annotated below (fig. 14). Some of these names correspond to the portraits on the previous pages and to the individuals identified in the textual description of the group portrait.8 The Ottoman ruler is situated amidst his most senior political, administrative, and military elites. This network of Ottoman alliances incorporates leaders from the Department of the General Staff and the imperial army as well as Halil Paşa, the head of the Tophane Arsenal, and senior representatives from the major branches of the army, with foot soldiers, cavalry, and artillery among them. The group also included representatives from the ministries of internal and foreign affairs, Saib Bey and Said

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Figure 14. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 18 from Chlebowski’s Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864. Pencil on paper, 22 × 29.6 cm. Photographer: Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005 / 18.

Efendi. Fuad Paşa, the painting’s commissioner, has a central place within this grouping. (He is number 4 in the diagram.) At the time he was both Grand Vezier and Serasker (commander of the armed forces).9 In addition to his distinguished military service during the Crimean War, Fuad was well known in Europe through his service in the ministry of foreign affairs, which included postings in Spain, Portugal, and England, and for playing a key role negotiating major conflicts such as those in Bucharest and Lebanon.10 Renowned as among the most powerful men of his era, he was one of the three key statesmen who advanced the modernizing reforms of the T ­ anzimat

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Figure 15. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 10 from Chlebowski’s Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864. Pencil on paper, 22 × 29.6 cm. Photographer: Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005 / 10.

period. Fuad’s portrait commission was an effective vehicle for commemorating the seniority of its commissioner and underscoring his privileged relationship to the Ottoman leader for whom the work was intended. Two early compositional studies for this work reveal that the group portrait was set outside, near the encampment. They delineate the topography of the site and the sultan’s magnificent ceremonial tent situated on a raised mound.11 In the pencil sketch (fig. 15), the sultan stands to the left of center, with the senior Ottomans on the right and his horse and attendants on the left.12 He is slightly isolated from both groups as a mark of status. The second of the four paintings in the Fuad Paşa commission was also a complex multifigure portrait incorporating infantry, cavalry, and artillery as a way to represent the stratifications of the contemporary Ottoman military through its system of ranks. Seven pages of Chlebowski’s sketchbook contain meticulously observed watercolor drawings of these costumed figures, each with their regiments or battalions annotated in Polish in the top left corner. Page two, for example, is a drummer from the first regiment of foot soldiers (fig. 16).13 Most of the drawings in this sketchbook relate to the first two paintings in the series of four. One aerial view on the back of page ten, however, could be a preliminary study for the third work, which is characterized in contemporary documents as a general view of the military encampment of Levent Çiftliği at sunrise. So, too, the topographical sketch on the top of page eighteen (fig. 17) is likely to have been rendered for the fourth painting, which shows the sultan on horseback overlooking military exercises on the shores of the Bosporus at Emirgan. This location facilitated the inclusion of warships,

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Figure 16. Stanisław Chlebowski, “The First Regiment of Foot Soldiers,” page 2 from Chlebowski’s Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 22 × 29.6 cm. Photographer: Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005 / 2.

Figure 17. Stanisław Chlebowski, page 18 from Chlebowski’s Constantinople sketchbook (detail), 1864. Pencil on paper, 22 × 29.6 cm. Photographer: Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005 / 18.

thus incorporating both branches of the armed forces.14 Several other full and partial compositional sketches are related to this project, but they less obviously correspond to the written accounts of the final paintings.15 Produced at an experimental stage, these field sketches were no doubt subject to numerous revisions as Chlebowski incorporated feedback from Sultan Abdülaziz, Fuad Paşa, and other Ottoman interlocutors. Upon completion, the four paintings were publicly exhibited for eight days at the Galatasaray Barracks beginning on April 1, 1865. Journal de Constantinople, a local newspaper, invited its readers to view them before they were relocated to the throne room of Beylerbeyi Palace. Their installation there after April 8 coincided with the palace’s inauguration on the twenty-first of that month, an event celebrated by elaborate public ceremony. The festivities commenced with a military parade and gun salute at the Dolmabahçe Palace; then the sultan crossed the Bosporus, which was crowded with Ottoman warships. Upon disembarkation on the Asian shore, Abdülaziz led the official selamlık ceremony at the Beylerbeyi Mosque, after which he entered his new palace by passing through a parade of officials in ceremonial dress. The account of this event in the local newspaper Tercüman-ı Ahval specifies the monetary gifts bestowed by the sultan on the imperial galleons, frigates, steamships, and corvettes and to each battalion of soldiers.16 The following day an audience was held in the official apartments, where the ministers swore allegiance to the sultan. For the duration of the inauguration, the Bosporus and the palaces on either side of

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this waterway were transformed into a stage on which the military, naval, and administrative elites joined to celebrate the sultanate and empire. Fuad Paşa’s commission was particularly appropriate to this event. Portraits of many of those who were involved and who pledged allegiance to the sultan inside his new palace were represented in the four paintings that celebrated him as supreme commander of a disciplined modern force. The group portrait emphasized the affiliated network of the sultan’s military and administrative elites, while the poetic evocation of a new dawn in the painting of the encampment at sunrise resonated with his ambitions for military and naval regeneration and expansion.17 The accompanying paintings presented an organized and disciplined modern force engaged in the rigors of military training in preparation for combat in the field. Such themes harmonized with the decorative program of the Beylerbeyi Palace interior, where naval vessels decorated the ceiling along with calligraphic invocations of Ottoman victory, justice, and prosperity. Fuad Paşa’s gift was appropriately targeted in this context; he clearly understood the importance of the Beylerbeyi Palace project to the sultan. (Serkis Balyan, the sultan’s architect, relayed the monarch’s personal involvement in all stages of the creative planning of his architectural commissions, even working on the plans with a red pencil.)18 While the sultan’s photographic portraits were widely circulated in Istanbul and beyond, his group portraits had a contingent relationship to the ceremonial function of his new palace. An oil sketch for a ceremonial group portrait with stronger historical resonances introduces yet another dimension to the sultan’s complex image creation. Titled Sultan Abdülaziz in the Topkapı Palace Courtyard (fig. 18), this oil sketch in the National Museum in Kraków affirms the sultan’s legitimacy through an iconographic and performative reiteration of ceremonial ritual conducted by his forebears. Contemporary Ottoman military, administrative, and religious elites are paying homage to the sultan in a ceremonial reception in front of the Bābü’s-sa‘āde (Gate of Felicity) in the second courtyard of the historic Ottoman palace, a ceremonial venue for the public appearance of the sultans over the centuries.19 Here, Sultan Abdülaziz stands in the place of his dynastic predecessors. As with the Fuad Paşa commission, group portraiture is used in this painting to commemorate the ceremonial performance of state power. This painting, however, utilizes a similar compositional format to an earlier work in the palace collection by Kostantin Kapıdağlı that depicts Sultan Selim III presiding over an audience in the same location around 1789 (fig. 19). Chlebowski’s contemporary group portrait thereby accrues densely layered historical iconographic associations. While the sultan’s group portraits played a key role in palace ceremonial for Abdülaziz and his elites, lending allegorical and historical gravitas to his appearance, his photographic portraits ensured that for the first time the ruler’s image was more widely available to local and foreign audiences. His photograph was also used to create the miniature portraits that Chlebowski and others were commissioned to paint. While the production of the sultan’s portrait in the carte de visite format meant that his image was available in a more economical form, his miniature portraits were luxury items,

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Figure 18. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sultan Abdülaziz in the Topkapı Palace Courtyard, c. 1865–​76. Oil on canvas, 23.5 cm × 39.5 cm. From the collection of the National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK II-a-1121. Figure 19. Kostantin Kapıdağlı, Sultan Selim III in Audience, c. 1789. Oil, 206 × 152 cm. © Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, Inv. No. 17 / 163.

Figure 20. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1876. Gouache on bone, 10.9 × 8.5 cm. Photographer: Krzysztof Wilczyński / Ligier Studio /  National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Min. 546.

like the medals and awards that were also created during his reign and were bestowed by the sultan on his statesmen and on foreign visitors (fig. 20).20 These cartes de visite, miniature portraits, and medals enabled the dissemination of the sultan’s image beyond the palace as intimate, portable objects.

O T T O M A N O R N A M E N TA L I S M

The Ottoman regal photographic portraits were disseminated further still when used as the basis for the sultan’s representation in illustrated newspapers from major European capitals that the sultan visited in 1867. Since this was the first-ever European voyage of an Ottoman sultan, it was an initial chance to see the leader of the famed Ottoman dynasty in European metropolises, and the trip attracted great media attention. The occasion for the voyage was the international exposition in Paris, and the sultan articulated the diplomatic objectives of his journey in a speech he delivered in London, where he asserted that the aim was “to establish, not only among my own subjects, but

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Figure 21. Abdullah Frères, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1863. Albumen print, 20.3 × 16 cm. Ömer M. Koç Collection, Istanbul.

between my people and the other nations of Europe, that feeling of brotherhood which is the foundation of human progress and the glory of our age.”21 Despite the mismatch between this diplomatic rhetoric and the realities of the political tensions and economic inequalities between the Ottoman Empire and the most powerful European states in this period, both the sultan’s oratory and the visual statements delivered through photographs and paintings that the Ottoman Empire displayed at the international exposition delivered a clear message about the empire’s claim to an equal standing among the community of European nations.22 The account of the Ottoman pavilion in the official catalogue attests to the centrality of Sultan Abdülaziz’s photographic and painted portraits. Royal portraiture formed a hinge between the long-standing tradition of representing the Ottoman sultans through painting and the current sultan’s embrace of the modern medium of photography.23 The sultan’s official photograph (fig. 21) was hung among a carefully chosen grouping of eminent Ottoman and French political, diplomatic, and religious figures, as a visual assertion of the ideals of affiliation that he sought to bolster. As the earlier commis-

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Figure 22. Abdul Aziz Khan, Sultan of Turkey. From Illustrated London News, July 13, 1867, page 33. Taken from a copy held in the State Library of New South Wales (TF00013).

sion by Fuad Paşa utilized portraiture to stress networks of elite Ottoman affiliation, the Paris installation translated that aspiration into the international arena. Portraiture was not the only genre brought into service in this context. Two of four panoramas by the Abdullah Frères were taken from the Beyazıt Tower (located within the Ministry of War). They encompass the famous monuments of the old city in the midground, including the Hagia Sophia and the great royal mosques seen from a symbolic vantage point of Ottoman power. These were deliberate, careful choices about how to stage the Ottoman Empire photographically in Paris in 1867 that pivoted around the image of the sultan. At each of the European capitals he visited, Sultan Abdülaziz was officially received with great pomp and ceremony. His every move was reported in the press, and the Abdullah Frères portraits that sartorially conveyed the sultan’s deliberate self-styling as a modern monarch were repeatedly reproduced (fig. 22). An account from the Times provides us a sense of how jarring this modern image of the sultan was for some European viewers who evidently expected a more exotic Eastern spectacle. “Perhaps a prevalent sentiment in the minds of many here who looked upon Abdul-Aziz was a feeling of

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Figure 23. W & D Downey, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1867. Albumen carte de visite, 9.2 × 5.4 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

astonishment that he wore no turban nor baggy trousers, that he did not look in the least like the Saracen’s head, that when he sat down he did not tuck his legs under him like a true-begotten Turk, but that he dressed and sat like a Christian—​and, like a Christian, also looked melancholy and ineffably bored.”24 When the sultan sat for his portrait while in London, the photographs were taken by William Downey, Queen Victoria’s royal photographer. These portraits of the sultan, his son, and his nephew were taken within the apartments of Buckingham Palace (fig. 23). The resulting images of the modern sultan, taken in the heart of the British imperial

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Figure 24. Abdullah Frères, Sultan Abdülaziz, c. 1869. Carte de visite, 10.6 × 6.2 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14).

capital, were a visual confirmation of the rhetoric of affiliation articulated in the sultan’s speech. Circulated widely, the photographs were an eloquent visual testament of the intimate alliance between the two royal households and thus the affiliation between the Ottoman and British empires. Perhaps it was hoped that such photographs would contradict those at home and abroad who remained skeptical about the Ottoman-British alliance. Photography was also put into service to commemorate this visit when a profile portrait of the sultan (fig. 24) was supplied for the purposes of creating a medal to commemorate a reception held at the Guildhall in London on July 18 in his honor.25 These

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historic photographs demonstrate that in the Ottoman Empire, as for other European nations, the new medium of photography was taking its place alongside painting and print media within the commemorative rituals of formal international state visits. The costly celebrations and military reviews held on the occasion of the sultan’s visit to Paris and London were understood to be of particular political importance. Reporting on the sultan’s visit, the journalist for the Times succinctly characterized the value of such pageantry in London. “It is the habit of foreign rulers to measure the cordiality of their hosts by these outward indications of respect, and so long as the country maintains the apparatus of pageantry it will be gratified at finding it employed on those occasions when it may have a real political importance.”26 Each of the ceremonies for Sultan Abdülaziz was carefully crafted. On July 17 a naval review was held in his honor at Spithead and an investiture ceremony took place on board the royal yacht where Queen Victoria bestowed the Order of the Garter on Sultan Abdülaziz. This event was commemorated in a painting by George Housman Thomas.27 Other celebrations were given a novel musical component in recognition of the sultan’s particular interest. Most notably, a hybrid choral composition with “oriental” melodic accents, an Ode to the Sultan with music by Luigi Arditi and words by Zafıraki Efendi, was performed during a royal command performance at the Crystal Palace. Soloists accompanied by a large British choir sang the ode in Ottoman, which was phonetically transcribed into Latin script. (An English translation was published in the Times the following day.)28 The sultan must have also been particularly delighted to hear his own composition, La Gondole Barcarolle, played by the band of the Grenadier Guards when he dined with the Prince of Wales at his residence at Marlborough House.29 As well as shoring up relations through such personalized royal hospitality, the grander ceremonial events were vehicles for displaying British imperial splendor. The decorations in India House for the ball held in honor of the sultan, for example, showcased “a huge tiger’s head and shoulders . . . in gold . . . a trophy from the treasurehouse of Tippoo Sultan,”30 a reminder of imperial conquest in British India, while the courtyard’s sculptural decoration highlighted Britain’s international alliances. Such calculated spectacles of imperial power, or ornamentalism, to invoke David Cannadine’s term, impressed the sultan and no doubt affirmed the value of his own engagement with visual culture as part of Ottoman statecraft.31 In Paris and London, the sultan was hosted at a number of venues where imperial supremacy was celebrated through triumphalist historic visual narratives. In Paris he was taken to the Hôtel des Invalides and shown Napoleon’s tomb and the refectory battle cycles painted by Parrocel for Louis XIV.32 Additionally, he was hosted at Versailles, where he saw the Galerie des Glaces and the Galerie des Batailles—​t he memorial that re-created French military history for a modern audience under the reformist monarchy of Louis Philippe in the early nineteenth century. In London the sultan visited the Houses of Parliament, where he admired Maclise’s prominent and recently completed waterglass paintings, Death of Nelson and Meeting of Wellington and Blücher (fig. 25).33

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Figure 25. The Royal Gallery, Houses of Parliament, Westminster, July 2011. © House of Lords 2014. Photographer: Chris Moyse.

The important public role for historic battle paintings within these venues in London and Paris no doubt affirmed the value of the sultan’s most significant painting commission, which was already well underway in Istanbul. Differences in composition, narrative priorities, and aesthetic language, however, underscore the distinctiveness of the sultan’s Ottoman history cycle.

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While the photographic portraits circulated during Abdülaziz’s reign provide ample evidence of the sultan’s pragmatic recognition that this was the new way for modern monarchs to present themselves on the world stage, his sketches for Stanisław Chlebowski’s battle painting series convey his personal passion for the visual arts.34 Abdülaziz was directly involved with his architectural projects and even boldly commissioned his own freestanding equestrian portrait from the British sculptor Charles Fuller in 1872.35 The most persuasive evidence for his investment in the project of statecraft through visual culture is the large cache of the sultan’s sketches, now housed in Kraków, that relate to a series of battle paintings he commissioned Chlebowski to produce. Examining these sketches and paintings reveals the sultan’s distinctive approach to interpreting Ottoman history.

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Figure 26. Stanisław Chlebowski, Battle of Varna (1444), 1865. Oil on canvas, 287 × 394 cm. © Harbiye Askeri Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Istanbul, Inv. No. 504.

The largest and probably Chlebowski’s first battle paintings for the sultan are those representing the Battle of Varna (fig. 26 and fig. 27), the great Ottoman military victory in eastern Bulgaria achieved during the reign of Sultan Murad II on November 10, 1444. During this battle Ottoman forces defeated the crusader army led by Władysław I King of Hungary (also King of Poland, Władysław III). The king was killed in combat, thus securing a decisive Ottoman victory in the struggle between the kingdom of Hungary and the Ottomans for dominance in the Balkans. This victory enhanced Ottoman prestige in the Muslim world, effectively ending the Crusade of Varna and paving the way for the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.36 Chlebowski’s paintings draw the viewer right into the action of cavalry combat, as each work foregrounds an Ottoman on a galloping white steed slaying their opponent. In figure 26 this singular triumph is generalized to underscore Ottoman imperial conquest by positioning the two central combatants under their respective Ottoman and Habsburg standards. In figure 27, territorial conquest at Varna and the religious significance of the defeat of this crusade for the Muslim forces is signaled through the Ottoman green standard flying triumphantly from the fortress ramparts. The drama of crusader defeat is powerfully conveyed through the pair behind the falling European combatant—​one rushes for-

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Figure 27. Stanisław Chlebowski, Battle of Varna (1444), c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 287 × 394 cm. © Harbiye Askeri Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Istanbul, Inv. No. 503.

ward, arms outstretched, poised to buffer the cavalryman’s fall, while the other strains to broadcast this imminent tragic loss by furiously sounding his bugle. A later version of this battle that Chlebowksi painted back in Europe has greater legibility in terms of the accepted European historical narrative of events of Varna, but its relative stasis underscores that the sultan’s series exhibits a preference for drama and action in the field of combat.37 The sultan’s Varna paintings were signed with Chlebowski’s name in Latin and Ottoman script and dated 1865. They are the only signed and dated works among a large commission of twenty-six paintings now divided between the Dolmabahçe Palace and the Military Museum in Istanbul. Except for these two paintings, their attribution has been uncertain and they are currently designated “School of Chlebowski.”38 However, a comparative analysis of the paintings and their related sketches now housed in Poland confirms the paintings to be the work of Chlebowski. Nevertheless, beyond this new certainty of attribution, these paintings, sketches, and inscriptions provide an Ottoman vision of the past that was collaboratively created by the sultan and the Polish artist. The vast number of red ink sketches that Abdülaziz created as a guide to his court painter includes compositional designs as well as numerous smaller drawings that

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Figure 28. Sultan Abdülaziz, sketch for The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper, in an album of the sultan’s sketches, 26.7 × 17.4 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a.-10325.

delineate the pose and gesture of combatants, and convey information about Ottoman historic costume, weaponry, and military standards. All of the sultan’s sketches exhibit a robust energy and are executed with deft strokes in sweeping confident lines. This corpus provokes a vacillating affective response where imaginative transport is intermittently interrupted by the missteps of the striving amateur draftsman. Their irresolution is an index of the process of experimentation in the Dolmabahçe Palace studio where the two men worked between 1865 and 1872.39 Reconnecting these sketches to their related paintings reveals their stages of production and collaborative authorship. The Kraków collection, for example, includes the sultan’s preliminary compositional sketch (fig. 28) for the Istanbul Military Museum’s painting The Pitched Battle of Mohaç (fig. 29). The National Museum in Warsaw holds Chlebowski’s gridded drawing for this same painting, revealing how he worked to translate the sultan’s sketch onto canvas (fig. 30).40 The sultan also made corrections in red ink on top of some of Chlebowski’s compositional drawings. These emendations disclose just how intimately the sultan was supervising his palace painter in the Dolmabahçe Palace studio, and they reveal Abdülaziz’s preference for action, expressed through energetic combat and the massing of figures. This is especially evident in his ink markings overlaid on Chlebowski’s compositional drawing for The Mora Rebellion (fig. 1). They instruct the painter to insert the Ottoman standard behind the two central cavalrymen and to reposition them so they strain further forward and rise out of their saddles more physically engaged in combat. The

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Figure 29. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 112 × 175 cm. © Harbiye Askeri Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Inv. No. 342. Figure 30. Stanisław Chlebowski, study for The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, c. 1865–​72. Pencil on paper, 27 × 39.8 cm. Photographer: Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Rys.Pol.1966.

Figure 31. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Mora Rebellion, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 112 × 175 cm. © Harbiye Askeri Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Inv. No. 11477.

resulting painting bears out these instructions (fig. 31). Abdülaziz also inserts a mêlée of Greek rebels who were either slain on the ground or flee on foot to create a heightened sense of turmoil and strident reprisal. The conventional role of a powerful patron to oversee and arbitrate is augmented here by the sultan’s artistic interventions. A remarkable economy of crimson ink lines delineate the central protagonist in the sultan’s preliminary sketch (fig. 32) for the painting The Battle of Serdar Mehmed Paşa in Temeşvar (fig. 33).41 Horse and rider are as one, ignited into action by the ferocious energy of combat. A similar potency is conveyed through Abdülaziz’s complex multifigure studies. The parapets of the fortifications on the left, in the sketch for The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress, vibrate with massed human action, while on the right the page explodes into life with the arrival of the mounted Ottoman combatants in the foreground. The sultan’s sketch (fig. 34) establishes the directional visual logic for this painting (fig. 35) as the Ottoman forces proceed from right to left, progressively claiming the three levels of the fortress. In order to glorify the victorious Ottoman armies the sultan sought to render them in conflict with an engaged and determined foe. This is evident in the sultan’s sketch (fig. 36) for The Siege of the Fortress of Semendre (fig. 37).42 Through an assured economy of gestural marks, individual figures are distilled into as little as four rudimentary lines and these riflemen are thus physically fused into a single fighting unit. Now, as then, these sketches invite an imaginative engagement with the Ottoman past as the empire’s history is represented through the force of combat on the field of battle.

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Figure 32. Sultan Abdülaziz, Sketch of a Rider, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper, in an album of the sultan’s sketches, 22 × 17.2 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a-10323. Figure 33. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Battle of Serdar Mehmed Paşa in Temeşvar, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 75 × 123 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 13 / 577.

Figure 34. Sultan Abdülaziz, sketch for The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper, in an album of the sultan’s sketches, 16.5 × 24.7 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a.-10356. Figure 35. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 91.3 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1517.

Figure 36. Sultan Abdülaziz, Battle Sketch, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper, in an album of the sultan’s sketches, 17.7 × 11.5 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a-10359. Figure 37. Stanisław Chlebowski, The Siege of the Fortress of Semendre, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 75.6 × 124.6 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1491.

Figure 38. Stanisław Chlebowski, Entry of Sultan Mehmed II into Constantinople, c. 1874–​84. Oil on canvas, 500 × 1100 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK II-a-72.

In addition to this visual dialogue, there is further evidence that these paintings are an expression of the sultan’s aesthetic priorities in Chlebowski’s correspondence with his former teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme. By 1876 Gérôme was concerned that Chlebow­ ski’s approach to painting complex, multifigured compositions had altered as a result of this long period of working under instruction to the sultan. When invited to provide feedback on the preparatory studies for Chlebowski’s painting Entry of Sultan Mehmed II into Constantinople (fig. 38), the artist’s first major project initiated after his palace commission, Gérôme urged Chlebowski to reconsider his approach. The French master advised his former student to enhance the painting’s legibility through simplification, to highlight the distinction between conqueror and conquered by increasing the tonal contrast and reducing the profusion of distracting detail. Gérôme disclosed what he determined was the source of these failings in the letter he wrote to Chlebowski on February 14, 1876. In this letter that implicitly critiques the influence of Chlebowski’s Ottoman royal patron, Gérôme warned the artist “against certain tendencies,” elaborating, “I long for you to return here [to Paris], for there is in you the stuff of a painter who has been spoilt by ten years of forced style (chic forcé). You’ll need to forget all that.”43 Not only did the sultan assert his compositional preferences for his battle series, but he also specified the inclusion of Ottoman inscriptions on the top right of six paintings. Among the cache of ink drawings in Kraków are three pages of text in the same red ink as the sultan’s sketches; he likely wrote this text (fig. 39, fig. 40, and fig. 41). Four of the inscriptions on these pages match the text on paintings in Istanbul. (The extra two on these pages suggest there may have been plans for eight paintings in total in this format.) It is uncertain who transcribed the inscriptions onto the canvases, but it was clearly not Chlebowski. Each deliberate mark of Ottoman script is the result of many years of disciplined practice. They bespeak the proficiency of a hand that has repeated

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Figure 39. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman inscriptions for battle paintings, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper, in an album of the sultan’s sketches, 21.1 × 35.1 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a.-10364. Figure 40. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman inscription for a battle painting, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper, in an album of the sultan’s sketches, 16.2 × 18.8 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a-10365. Figure 41. Sultan Abdülaziz, Ottoman inscription for a battle painting, c. 1865–​72. Ink on paper, in an album of the sultan’s sketches, 9.8 × 18.2 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK III-r.a-10366.

Figure 42. Stanisław Chlebowski, Attack on the Fortress of Belgrade at the Time of Sultan Mahmud I, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 75 × 124.3 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul. Inv. No. 11 / 1496.

such strokes and marks over and over under the disciplined guidance of a master calligrapher.44 Their fluency is in marked contrast to Chlebowski’s own awkward efforts to sign his name in Ottoman on a page that remains among the artist’s papers.45 Including inscriptions at the top right of the paintings created a hybrid visual language that refers to the word and image relationship of the Ottoman miniature tradition and relocates it into the Western mode of easel painting.46 Military painting on canvas has few precedents within Ottoman culture. (Portraiture is the genre for most of the pre-nineteenthcentury easel paintings in the Topkapı Palace collection.)47 There was, however, a longstanding tradition of representing Ottoman military history in illustrated manuscripts, such as the Gazaname (book of war). Abdülaziz’s series is a legacy of that tradition.48 Each inscription denotes the represented battle and its main protagonist, thus clarifying and prescribing the Ottoman viewer’s interpretation. On Chlebowski’s painting (fig. 42), the inscription specifies that this otherwise generic battle scene represents the Siege of Belgrade during the reign of Sultan Mahmud I. In 1739 the Ottomans recaptured the Serbian city from the Habsburgs, who had occupied it since 1717. The parapets of the city’s fortress are lined with figures in Ottoman costume (including what appears to be a group of veiled women on the farthest left rampart). This indicates the city has already been recaptured, with the Ottoman cavalry below struggling to repel the Habsburg soldiers. This event was one of many battles with the Habsburgs to secure the rule of a city that had first been taken by the Ottomans under Sultan Süleyman in

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Figure 43. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sultan Mehmed III at the Battle of Eğri, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 75.3 × 124.2 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul. Inv. No. 11 / 1494.

1521. Capturing Belgrade, the key to the southern defense zone, was a crucial victory in Süleyman’s assault on Hungary and the West.49 The Green Ottoman standard, the symbol of the sultan as caliph (leader and protector of the Muslim faithful), was carried into the field of combat by a cavalryman as seen on the right in this painting. The presence of the standard invokes the Ottoman tradition of gaza (holy war for Islam). The prominence of one of the city’s mosques behind Belgrade’s fortress walls, as seen on the left in this painting, has symbolic significance in this context as a reminder of the longevity of the Ottoman presence. Belgrade’s mosques were visible symbols of the city’s contested occupation. Bajrakli (Bayraklı) Mosque, the most famous, was converted into a Roman Catholic church during the Habsburg occupation and was reclaimed after the success of the 1739 Ottoman siege. The three-line inscription on Sultan Mehmed III at the Battle of Eğri conveys supplementary information (fig. 43) to the painting’s visual message. In the foreground of the painting the vanquished Austrian commanders and their standards are being brought before Sultan Mehmed III, showcasing the Ottoman’s symbolic victory at the Battle of Eğri in 1596. Capturing this fort dealt a significant blow to the Habsburg and Transylvanian communication routes.50 The three lines of text in the top right-hand corner of this painting augment the painting’s triumphant visual narrative by iterating the practical military achievements of the struggle—​the seizure of ninety cannons and other military hardware.

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The production of this history painting cycle coincided with the new approaches to writing history that Ottoman intellectuals adapted from Western methods.51 So too, the sultan’s series of battle paintings adapted the language of Western history painting to represent an historical narrative of the empire’s growth and consolidation. This series places particular emphasis on the expansion and defense of the empire’s borders in central and southeast Europe. Ten of the paintings heroize the sultans themselves on the battlefield. (Many of these reveal that the painter drew on the Young Album for the physiognomy and costume of these sultans.) Other paintings depict the designated military leaders who were the sultan’s representative. A major focus within the series was the border conflicts between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs in Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula, thus highlighting the fortress system of defense along these continually shifting frontiers. Eighteen of the twenty-six paintings represent Ottoman-Habsburg conflicts. This region was particularly resonant for the Ottomans in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the southeastern European borders were again being disputed as the Ottoman state strove to prevent territorial losses. Four paintings in the series represent Ottoman reprisals against Greek rebels in the Peloponnese. This was a particularly potent subject for the Ottomans in the nineteenth century given that the Greek war of independence, begun in the Peloponnese in 1821, was the first and most prominent of the nationalist movements that threatened the territorial integrity of the modern Ottoman Empire. Interpreted alongside Fuad Paşa’s group portrait commission, these visual representations of historic triumph on the battlefield are matched by contemporary portraits of an orderly modern military under the reigning sultan’s command. This Ottoman visual history thus affirmed contemporary imperial aspirations. In 1867, the same year as the sultan’s European voyage, Chlebowski created an oil study for an historic group portrait of the Ottoman dynasty (fig. 44). Sultan Abdülaziz is depicted in the center of this painting surrounded by his venerable forebears. Drawing on earlier works in the palace collection, this painting incorporates portraits of all of the sultans back to the dynasty’s founder, Osman I.52 As Günsel Renda notes, this temporally syncretic group portrait format is without precedent in the palace collection.53 I would argue, however, that we are now able to establish that within the corpus of works produced for Sultan Abdülaziz, this historic group portrait functions as a hinge between his contemporary painted and photographic portraits and his history painting project. The combined use of text and image within this group portrait demonstrates an affinity between this oil sketch and the historic battle paintings that Chlebowski executed for the sultan. Again the inscriptions have a denotative function, with the foremost sultans named in the lower panel. The inscribed pillars create a spatial and temporal frame for the sultans arranged on the steps of the Sultanahmet Mosque. On the right, the inscription marks the year of the dynasty’s founding under Osman Han Gazi (son of Ertuğrul), while the text on the left pillar, venerating the reigning Sultan Abdülaziz, registers the year (AH 1283 / 1866–​67 CE) and specifies this as a collective portrait of his ancestors. Consecutive refrains of the Kalimat at-Tawhid, the profession

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Figure 44. Stanisław Chlebowski, Ottoman Sultans, 1867. Oil on canvas, 23 × 38.8 cm. Lviv National Art Gallery, Inv. No. Ж-434.

of faith, connect the two pillars. The portrait of Abdülaziz is based on what was by this stage a familiar prototype derived initially from his photographic image. More than the iconographic resemblances, however, it demonstrates an impulse to find new ways of articulating the legitimacy of the contemporary Ottoman sultanate through imagery invoking its historical legacy. Produced in a century when diplomacy was as important as combat for the survival of the Ottoman Empire, and when diminished Ottoman military capacities necessitated alliances with the superior European powers for success in major conflicts, these paintings and photographs played a crucial role in the visual culture of Ottoman diplomacy. Displayed in the sultan’s palaces on the Bosporus, the Ottoman historical narratives were undoubtedly inspirational and salutary for their elite Ottoman audience. It is likely they were also aspirational for Abdülaziz, who heavily invested in enlarging and retraining his armed forces in an effort to regain something of the empire’s former military stature on the world stage. And in the context of state visits, they were probably intended to impress upon Abdülaziz’s European visitors the cultural sophistication of the reigning sultan as well as the proud historical legacy of the empire on the world stage. Two years after his European voyage, the sultan hosted the state visits of Empress Eugénie and the Prince and Princess of Wales in Istanbul.54 The French empress stayed in Beylerbeyi Palace. Chlebowski was well placed to record this state visit because of his close ties to the sultan and extensive international networks. Indeed his drawing of Empress

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Figure 45. After Stanisław Chlebowski, “Voyage of H. M. the Empress—​Constantinople—​Reception by H. M. of the Diplomatic Corps in the Great Hall of the Beylerbeyi Palace—​after a sketch by M. Chlebowski.” (“Voyage de S. M. l’Impératrice—​Constantinople—​Réception par S. M. du corps diplomatique dans la grande salle du palais de Beylerbey—​D’après un croquis de M. Chlebowski.”) From L’Illustration, Journal Universel 54, no. 1394 (November 13, 1869): 309. Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections, Fisher Library, University of Sydney.

Eugénie hosted by Abdülaziz in Beylerbeyi’s blue salon was published in the popular French paper L’Illustration (fig. 45). This print, like the sultan’s portrait photographs, enabled the broader dissemination of a message about the modernizing sultanate. Sultan Abdülaziz’s energetic efforts at imperial self-fashioning through visual culture came to a dramatic end with his deposition in 1876. The abject photograph of the sultan disrespectfully flanked by two lower-ranking palace workers was, as Bahattin Öztuncay argues, in all likelihood produced in the short interval between his deposition on May 30 and his mysterious death on June 4 in 1876.55 Although not widely circulated, this humiliating image, which presents us with such a striking counterpoint to earlier photographs and painted portraits, seems so knowingly targeted by the sultan’s political opponents within the palace as to be a form of visual revenge against his earlier efforts at self-aggrandizement through visual culture. Although this photograph unequivocally signaled the end of Abdülaziz’s experiments in producing a new regal image of empire through the combined resources of painting and photography, his eventual successor, Sultan Abdülhamid II, approached the project of state making through visual culture with renewed vigor.

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For his part, Chlebowski left Istanbul in 1876. He was encouraged to do so by his friend and mentor, Jean-Léon Gérôme.56 In Europe he painted Orientalist genre scenes and history paintings celebrating Polish historic battles.57 Given his experience working for the Ottoman court, Chlebowski was well placed to contribute to the efflorescence of history painting taking place in Poland.58 Compositional inversions and substitutions enabled him to depict a number of the same battles he had represented for the sultan (such as the Battle of Varna), but this time foregrounding Polish heroism. The differences between the work for his Ottoman patron and those created for a Polish audience are dramatically exemplified through a comparison between Chlebowski’s painting of the First Siege of Vienna (fig. 46), now in Istanbul’s military museum, and his later painting of the second siege titled Battle of Vienna (fig. 47), now held in the National Museum in Kraków. Within Abdülaziz’s series, Chlebowski’s painting of the First Siege of Vienna led by Sultan Süleyman in 1529 triumphantly represents the pinnacle of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into central Europe.59 A dignified Süleyman holds steady on his white steed amidst the turmoil of combat that embroils most of the figures in the foreground and on the right side of this canvas. Sultan Süleyman and Sadrazam İbrahim are dramatically highlighted within this dark canvas. İbrahim is positioned on a charging horse at the very center of the canvas, slightly lower than the sultan. İbrahim’s centrality creates the compositional focal point for the energetic advance of the Ottoman forces from left to right. While physically propelled forward, the head of both horse and rider turn back toward the sultan, directing the viewer’s gaze there and reinforcing Süleyman’s preeminence. Directly below the sultan the Habsburg standard is trampled under the hooves of the advance. Further to the right, the most prominent of the Habsburg knights on a dramatically rearing horse is being felled by an Ottoman cavalryman. The calm nobility of Süleyman amidst this scene is conveyed through equestrian portrait conventions evoking classical tradition, and the portrait of the gray-bearded sultan is derived from the Young Album. Despite the fact that the sultan was in his mid-thirties at the time of the siege, he is represented here as an older man, a choice that distends the painting’s temporality to symbolically invoke the longevity of Süleyman’s rule and the extraordinary extent of his field campaigning to expand the empire.60 Chlebowski’s painting of the second siege of Vienna, created back in Europe, utilizes a strikingly similar compositional format to the one he had created for Abdülaziz. Through a series of substitutions and reversals, however, this later painting emphasizes the centrality of the Polish King Jan Sobieski in a narrative of European triumph over the Ottomans. The second siege of the Habsburg capital in 1683 was the symbolic turning point in Ottoman-European military history, signaling European ascendancy in central Europe. Polish King Sobieski, who led the European forces, occupies the place on the left side of the composition where the sultan had been in Chlebowksi’s painting of the first siege. Sobieski is flanked by his European allies as their respective standards billow on the skyline. The place occupied by Sadrazam İbrahim in the earlier painting is now taken by a Polish winged hussar on a white steed. Clad in his shiny burnished armor, he has all the visual accoutrements of these famed Polish fighters. A leopard skin is draped from

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Figure 46. Stanisław Chlebowski, The First Siege of Vienna, c. 1865–​72. Oil on canvas, 189 × 312 cm. © Harbiye Askeri Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Inv. No. 469.

his left shoulder across his torso, the koncerz sword strapped under his thigh, and most spectacularly the hussar wings are attached to his back.61 He leads the charge brandishing the Polish hussars’ defining weapon, the kopia (lance), backed up by the rest of his formidable company whose wings and lance pennants are visible behind. Chlebowski’s painting lionizes the hussars who had been spectacularly revived under Sobieski’s leadership in the seventeenth century and whose mythology was further embellished with the rise of Polish nationalism in the nineteenth century. The conjunction of Sobieski, the central hussar, and the Ottoman cavalryman on a white horse in the foreground on the right creates a clear diagonal movement of figures from top left to bottom right. Sobieski and his hussars are routing the Ottoman encampment that is in complete disarray on the right. In the foreground one of the magnificent Ottoman field tents is crushed underfoot while Kara Mustafa’s tent on the horizon is besieged by winged hussars. Converging on this tent, the hussars overwhelm the remaining Janissaries who are no match for these troops poised to tear down the Ottoman standard. Chlebowski includes elements of Orientalist fantasy, such as a veiled woman on camelback to the right of Kara Mustafa’s tent and caricatures in the representation of some of the foreground figures among those in the Ottoman camp who are scrambling to escape. In the painting of the first siege, the Janissaries with their characteristic headwear (borks) and magnificent costumes process nobly in front of Süleyman’s horse, whereas in Chlebowki’s painting of the second siege one of the Janissaries improbably clutches the Ottoman ceremonial mace and in a desperate flight for his life he is about to depart from the right edge of the painting. The single spire of Vienna’s landmark St. Stephen’s Cathedral locates the events depicted at

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Figure 47. Stanisław Chlebowski, Battle of Vienna, c. 1882. Oil on canvas, 114 × 190 cm. National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. MNK II-a-281.

some distance from the city, whereas the earlier painting situates the viewer at the very edge of the city’s walls, underscoring the triumphant Ottoman expansion into Europe that was seemingly invincible under Süleyman’s leadership. This is in dramatic contrast to the painting of the second siege where the Ottomans are being expelled.62 While this inversion of Ottoman iconography might seem to pose an affirmation of Orientalist binary distinctions between Christian Europe and its Muslim others, the contemporary political context for the production of these paintings does not readily affirm such an interpretation. Polish history painting was not underpinned by the politics of territorial imperialism, nor even by national sovereignty. In a country that had been territorially divided between the Kingdoms of Prussia, Tsarist Russia, and Habsburg Austria since the eighteenth century, this project of Polish history making took on a particular urgency. And although on Chlebowski’s canvases the Ottomans were depicted as Poland’s historic foes, the Ottoman Empire refused to recognize the dissolution of Poland. Throughout the nineteenth century, Istanbul and Paris were safe havens for Polish exiles and royalists and through these Polish networks Chlebowski developed significant patrons in both cities.63

V I S UA L L E G A C I E S

In this chapter I have excavated two distinct forms of Ottoman patronage—​royal and elite. The Fuad Paşa commission for contemporary group portraits rendered in the context of military training that were presented to the sultan exemplifies elite Ottoman

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patronage. This form of gift culture has historical precedents in earlier commissions by Ottoman military elites for illustrated books, such as the gazaname (book of war) genre. Fuad Paşa’s group portraits were conceived as part of the ceremonial function of Beylerbeyi Palace, the sultan’s summer palace designed for the transaction of the affairs of state and to host official foreign visitors. Realized in the same period as the historic battle paintings, these portraits bound the sultan’s history paintings to a contemporary narrative of military reform. Yet the portraits had a more contingent relationship to their political moment than the history paintings. Created on the occasion of the palace’s inauguration, these portraits of those who held leading positions of state and senior military offices were swiftly superseded in the rapidly evolving political circumstances of the late Ottoman Empire. Thus the portraits would have quickly lost their political relevance. This may account for their subsequent disappearance from the palace collection. Given the prominence of Fuad Paşa within these group portraits it is unlikely that they would have been of service to Sultan Abdülhamid II’s program of political engagement through the visual arts. Fuad, who died in 1869, was one of the three most prominent Tanzimat statesmen in the period prior to Abdülhamid II’s reign against whom the new sultan defined his efforts to wrest back power from the senior bureaucracy toward the sultanate. The group portraits may well have been symbolic of these decades defined by the concentration of power in the hands of these Tanzimat statesmen. It is likely that Chlebowksi’s history painting cycle with its visual narrative of Ottoman history on the field of battle was more acceptable to Abdülhamid II. This series—​ representing the mobile and contested history of the empire’s European borders, and emphasizing the heroic Ottoman struggle, the warrior tradition, and the elastic boundaries of Ottoman territory in central and southeastern Europe—​was a narrative that continued to align with the contemporary state’s regenerative aspirations. However, it was Abdülaziz’s sketches that had a peripatetic life that speaks to the longer history connecting late Ottoman visual culture to Europe. The sultan’s unique sketches remained among Chlebowski’s personal effects when he returned to Europe.64 Perhaps he understood that his own artistic legacy was bound up in these unique products of his royal commission. Toward the end of his life and after his death, selections of them were published in several art journals and travelogues in Poland, England, and the Ottoman Empire.65 Sometimes reproduced alongside a portrait of Abdülaziz, they were enmeshed within shifting perceptions of the Ottoman state. In 1914, they returned to the Istanbul art milieu via publication in the recently established art journal Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi (fig. 48), a crucial organ for the discussion of contemporary Ottoman painting. In the article that accompanied the sketches, Sultan Abdülaziz was lauded as one of the early artists and enlightened patrons of the Ottoman modern painting movement.66 Just as the paintings that created the Ottoman historical narrative had served the politics of Sultan Abdülaziz’s modernizing state in the 1860s and ’70s, by the early twentieth century his sketches served the developing narrative of Ottoman and later Turkish modern art.

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Figure 48. M. Sami, “The Appeal of Drawing to the Sultans” (“Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim”). From Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists (Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi) 14 (March 1, 1914). Courtesy of Atatürk Library, Istanbul.

The most widely circulated images of Sultan Abdülaziz, however, were undoubtedly his official photographic portraits. Ironically, the 1867 Downey photographs were further disseminated because Abdülhamid II eschewed his own photographic portrait. Abdülhamid II took a different approach to the medium, commissioning scenes of his empire and its subjects to create his famous photographic albums in 1893. This ensured the Downey photograph of the young Prince Abdülhamid, taken in Buckingham Palace when he was there with his uncle, Sultan Abdülaziz, in 1867 and well before he ascended the throne, had greater currency during his reign than it might have otherwise. This portrait was often reproduced in the European print media when an image was required.

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A study of the complex range of history paintings, and painted and photographic portraits, produced during Sultan Abdülaziz’s reign reveals how instrumental visual culture was to both Abdülaziz and his successor’s approach to Ottoman statecraft. Despite the differing ways each deployed the medium, Abdülhamid was building on the legacy of his forebear Abdülaziz, during whose reign photography was for the first time seen as a resource that could be turned to advantage by the Ottoman state. So too this study of the unique artistic collaboration between Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz reveals the mutually entangled history of Ottoman and Polish state making and art making across this period.

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3 GÉRÔME IN ISTANBUL I don’t despair of one day or other going to shake your hand at your home with my paintbox on my back. JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME TO OSMAN HAMDY BEY, JANUARY 12, 1875

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer, c. 1879 (fig. 49), has attained a level of notoriety matched by few Orientalist paintings. Since its inclusion on the front cover of Edward Said’s landmark book, Orientalism, the painting has been imbued with a synoptic function to become a visual shorthand for the Orientalism debate.1 Through its superb rendering of İznik tile panels from the Topkapı Palace, the mise-en-scène of this painting invokes the cultural heritage of Istanbul, the city that was the center of the modernizing Ottoman state in the nineteenth century. Yet, as Linda Nochlin has so perspicaciously argued, this painting dissimulates any such contemporary cultural connotations in favor of a theatrical rendering of the Orient as a picturesque, eroticized diversion for the delectation of the European viewer.2 Since Nochlin’s important essay, scholars of Islamic art history have uncovered a mélange of sources and references in this painting, and in so doing its surface of seamless realism gives way to a more complex and intriguing aggregation. There is a beguiling accuracy and beauty about the rendition of fabrics, armor, and decorative tilework across this painting, and in their documentary merit some of Gérôme’s sources are impeccable. Indeed, one of the photographs of the Topkapı Palace harem precinct, which Gérôme is highly likely to have used in creating the majestic tiled panels in this painting, was by the Ottoman court photographers, the Abdullah Frères (fig. 50). This was one of few, rare early photographs of the most secluded interior spaces of the Topkapı Palace. Yet this painting sustains both a very precisely observed and a deeply ambiguous inscription of place. The tiles were from two different parts of the palace (the Altın Yol and the

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Figure 49. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, c. 1879. Oil on canvas, 82.2 × 121 cm. © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Figure 50. Abdullah Frères, Polychromatic Tile Panels (c. 1575) from the Imperial Baths, Installed in the Altın Yol, Topkapı Palace, n.d. Albumen print, 30 × 24 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, (2008.R.3).

Baghdad Pavilion) and have been substantially modified for the painter’s purposes.3 This composite setting is peopled by a motley group who would never have congregated in either of these most proscribed spaces of the palace. One can only imagine how willfully incoherent this composite painting might have appeared to elite nineteenth-century Ottoman viewers familiar with these most interdicted precincts of the Ottoman palace. While the iconography and ideology of Gérôme’s painting have been scrupulously researched and debated, scant attention has been paid to the painter’s travels to the Ottoman capital in the decade in which it was produced. In this chapter I investigate Gérôme’s journey to Istanbul in 1875. This was not his first visit to the Ottoman capital but a journey undertaken when his professional seniority ensured that his pedagogic networks were able to facilitate his access to some of the city’s foremost historic and religious sites. Once we shift the lens to examine Gérôme through accounts published in Istanbul’s nineteenth-century newspapers and bring into the debate other sources from the Turkish and Polish archives, we see that in this period Gérôme was also implicated in the Ottoman palace’s acquisition of contemporary European art. Gérôme had a dual role in this process as a facilitator of the acquisitions and as one of the painters under commission to the palace. Focusing on the circuits of production and reception of these European paintings destined for Istanbul’s elite Ottoman audience enables new ways of understanding this art as it entered the domain of Ottoman culture. Gérôme’s arrival in the capital of the Ottoman Empire on May 15, 1875, was much vaunted among Istanbul’s cosmopolitan expatriate community, and, judging from local newspaper reports, this community was well aware of his reputation both in France and across the Atlantic. Indeed his imminent arrival was announced in three successive articles in the Levant Herald, one of Istanbul’s local English- and French-language newspapers. The first, a short entry, appeared fourteen days in advance of his arrival.4 The second, published six days later, was a longer piece announcing that Gérôme had “been commissioned by the Sultan to execute some paintings for the palaces of Dolmabaghtché [Dolmabahçe] and Tcheragan [Çırağan]” and recounting his recent successes in London with the exhibition of The Sabre Dance (1875).5 Yet another article published four days after that, on May 11, disclosed that Gérôme’s host and guide on his excursions around Istanbul was to be his friend and former student, the painter Stanisław Chlebowski. (Indeed, a letter in the Chlebowski papers reveals it was he who wrote these newspaper accounts.)6 This article further bolstered Gérôme’s celebrity status with an extended account of his achievements in both the “old and new worlds.” 7 Once he had arrived in the capital, a succession of articles reported Gérôme’s unfolding itinerary to their local readership, praising Gérôme’s industriousness in producing about fifteen studies of mosques in Istanbul,8 including the New Mosque (Valide Sultan Mosque) and Rüstem Paşa Mosque (fig. 51), and several mosques in Scutari (Üsküdar) on the Asian shore of the Bosporus, all of which were to appear in subsequent paintings.9 Later reports specify the painter’s twelve-day visit to Bursa, commencing on June 2, to see the major Ottoman monuments, mosques, and tombs in the former Ottoman

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Figure 51. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Sketch of Rüstem Paşa Mosque, 1875. Oil on card on canvas, 24 × 32 cm. Musée Georges-Garret, Vesoul (France), Inv. 945.2.20.5 / photograph courtesy of Studio Claude-Henri Bernardot.

capital, again in the company of Chlebowski and the young French artist Antoine Buttura who had accompanied Gérôme from Paris.10 From these sites, it is recounted, the painter “has brought back with him a rich harvest of studies,” including sketches of the magnificent tiles in the Green Mosque.11 So too, they announced his intention to visit another former capital of the Ottoman Empire, Adrianople (Edirne), famous for Sinan’s Selimiye Mosque.12 Gérôme’s sense of heritage also encompassed tracing the footsteps of well-known Orientalists and former residents of Istanbul. As the Levant Herald noted, Gérôme visited Baghtchekeui (Bahçeköy) “to paint the picturesque neighbourhood of Belgrade and the great bends so charmingly described in the letters of our English Sevigné, Lady Mary Wortley Montague.”13 The letters Chlebowski wrote to his family while Gérôme and Buttura were staying with him at his home in Rue Aga-Hamam (Ağa-Hamamı Caddesi) reveal how productive this period was for each of them. By day two of the visit he wrote: “I have already walked them around Istanbul, we have paid all official and formal visits, and in a few days we will get ready to seat ourselves in the streets to make painting studies.”14 By May 27 they had made good on these plans and he wrote: “We are slaving here madly . . . we

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have already made dozens of studies in nature. We leave home for painting sessions at 5 in the morning and return dog-tired at 6 in the evening.”15 By the end of Gérôme’s stay Chlebowski triumphantly reported that, “For the one and a half months while my guest has been here, despite all the travel and excursions, I have managed to make 37 oil studies which are far more elaborate than all of my previous ones. In the future each of them will form the basis for a proper painting.”16 The visit was similarly productive for the indefatigable Gérôme. From these letters by Chlebowski and the articles in the local press we are able to establish a fairly precise sense of Gérôme’s itinerary in 1875, and of his visits to the sites that gave him material for his Orientalist paintings in the decades ahead. More significantly, however, they provide an insight into the professional networks into which Gérôme was received in Istanbul—​incorporating both the European expatriate community and Ottoman elites. In Istanbul, as elsewhere, Gérôme’s international network of former students provided a crucial entrée to the city’s cultural elites. His friend and former student, Stanisław Chlebowski, was a vital conduit17 but he was also welcomed by Osman Hamdi Bey and statesman and scholar Ahmed Vefik Paşa.18 As the Governor of Bursa, Vefik Paşa was instrumental in overseeing the restoration of the historic Ottoman monuments in that city. They were an important part of Ottoman cultural patrimony and of great interest to many Orientalist painters such as Gérôme, who developed numerous paintings of Bursa’s Green Tomb and Mosque from the studies he made in 1875.19 Another important contact for the painter was the Abdullah Frères, the OttomanArmenian photographers. Gérôme had his portrait taken in their Pera studio in 1875 and the firm continued to be an important source of photographs for Gérôme’s paintings even after he had left the Ottoman capital.20 Evidence of their ongoing contact is found in a Levant Herald article published on November 9, 1877. This report indicates that Gérôme had sent a painting of a bullfight to the Abdullah Frères studio in Istanbul. The same report notes that the delivery also contained a landscape by Buttura and some Gérôme and Fortuny photogravures published by Goupil.21 The Gérôme painting is Taureau et picador (fig. 52) and is inscribed, “Souvenir à MMrs Abdullah” (fig. 53).22 It is likely that this gift prompted the Abdullah Frères’ letter to the artist five days later on November 14, 1877, in which the photographers offer to send him any further photographs that he should need.23 As the official photographers to the Ottoman court, the Abdullah Frères were granted access to photograph palace sites that were otherwise out of bounds to other photographers. Such rare photographs were a valuable source for Gérôme including, as already mentioned, the Topkapı Palace interiors that are represented in The Snake Charmer. We have no sources confirming whether or not Gérôme actually visited the sultan’s residence, the Dolmabahçe Palace, during this 1875 trip, but some months later he was instrumental in negotiating the sale of paintings to the sultan through his fatherin-law’s firm, Goupil et Cie.24 A letter to Chlebowski from Albert Goupil on May 22, 1874, indicates that the Goupil firm was initially approached about this commission

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Figure 52. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bull and Picador (Tareau et picador), 1867–​68. Oil on canvas, 22.2 × 43.2 cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 2014. Figure 53. Detail of fig. 52.

by Edouard Cey, “secretary and friend to Hamdy Bey.” In this letter Albert Goupil asks Chlebowski to confidentially confirm Cey’s bonafides.25 Documents in the Dolmabahçe Palace archives reveal that once the commission was underway, the key interlocutor from inside the palace was Gérôme’s former student, Ahmed Ali Bey, one of the foremost Ottoman artists of his generation, who came to be known as Şeker Ahmed Paşa. In the mid-1860s Sultan Abdülaziz sponsored Ahmed Ali’s studies in Paris, where he worked in the studios of Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. Returning to Turkey sometime between 1871 and 1872, he quickly rose in rank and position in the palace bureaucracy.26 There are numerous documents in the Dolmabahçe Palace archives related to the purchase of these paintings between March 1875 and the end of 1876. These holdings include invoices from the company addressed to “Sa Majesté Impériale le Sultan,” transportation receipts for the delivery of crates of paintings addressed to Ahmed Bey from the Constantinople Agency of the Compagnie de Messageries Maritimes, records of money orders paid through the Crédit Lyonnais to Goupil et Cie, and telegrams sent from Paris to Istanbul by Gérôme and Goupil to Ahmed Aly (Ali) Bey, who was addressed as an aide-de-camp to the sultan and on one telegram as “Directeur des Beaux Arts” at the Dolmabahçe Palace.27 The telegrams are particularly intriguing. Even though they are

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Figure 54. Charles Émile van Marcke de Lummen, Arachon Basin (Basin d’Arachon), n.d. Oil on canvas, 143 × 201 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1514.

only one side of the correspondence, they give a sense of the liveliness of the protracted negotiations that took place between the Ottoman palace and the Parisian art dealers.28 They indicate that there was a complicated process involving various intermediaries to secure the purchases and surmount the geographic challenges of aesthetic decision making at a distance. The question as to whose taste this collection reflects is difficult to answer given that these records are only partial remnants of the negotiations. Certainly Goupil played an important role in recommending works by Gérôme and other artists that were available for purchase through the firm. A letter dated October 19, 1875, also reveals how instrumental Gérôme was in the decisions about a cache of paintings sent in the weeks prior to this date. He writes: “I myself have overseen the type and quality of the consignments.”29 Invoices in the Dolmabahçe Palace issued by the firm on October 7 and 15 demonstrate that the consignment Gérôme referred to included: Émile Van Marke de Lummen’s Basin d’Arachon (fig. 54), Boulanger’s Intérieur Pompéien (Le Gynécée) (fig. 55), Guiseppe de Nittis’s La Place de la Concorde (fig. 56), Chaplin’s Roses de mai (fig. 57), and Auteroche’s Un herbage à Dives (fig. 58). The telegrams confirm Ahmed Ali Bey was a crucial mediator, and Gérôme’s letter expresses his confidence in his former student

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Figure 55. Gustave-Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger, Pompeian Interior (The Gynaeceum) (Intérieur Pompéien [Le Gynécée]), 1875. Oil on canvas, 99 × 145.5 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 13 / 6. Figure 56. Giuseppe de Nittis, La Place de la Concorde, 1875. Oil. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Atatürk Müze Köşk Koleksiyonu, Ankara, Inv. No. 2615.

Figure 57. Charles Joshua Chaplin, Roses of May (Roses de mai), Salon 1875. Oil on canvas, 90 × 72 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 13 / 575.

Figure 58. Alfred Éloi Auteroche, A Pasture in Dives (Un herbage à Dives), n.d. Oil on canvas, 75 × 109 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1511.

as their contact inside the palace.30 Had the two men conferred about this commission a few months earlier when Gérôme was in Istanbul?31 Even if they had not, the palace bureaucrat must have known the work of many of the painters that were mooted for purchase because of his years as a student in the Parisian art world in the 1860s. It is tempting to conclude that Ahmed Ali Bey would have been partial to the landscape paintings that comprised nearly half of the acquired works, given the focus on this genre in his own art. The resonances between the sensibility of some of them and Şeker Ahmed’s work is notable, especially the Barbizon pictures, considering his preoccupation with creating atmospheric effects characteristic of this school of painting. His numerous forest glades (fig. 59) have something of a Barbizon atmospheric sensibility to them but, as has been observed by John Berger and Ahmet Kamil Gören, there are other pictorial and spatial sensibilities at work that belie a notion of slavish imitation of this European landscape school.32 Şeker Ahmed’s interest in works in the palace collection has been noted by scholars; for example, the influence of Aivazovsky’s Eyüp in the Moonlight (fig. 60) on Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s moonlit scene of sailboats at port of 1894 (fig. 61).33 But it is just as likely that the Ottoman painter was looking at Wahlberg’s An August Night in a Swedish Port (fig. 62) purchased through Goupil, given that his misty

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Figure 59. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Forest Light, 1887. Oil on canvas, 134 × 98 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 172.

Figure 60. Ivan Aivazovsky, Eyüp in the Moonlight, 1874. Oil on canvas, 94 × 74.5 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1082.

Figure 61. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Sailboats, 1894. Oil on canvas, 79 × 114.5 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 12 / 2732. Figure 62. Herman Alfred Leonard Wahlberg, An August Night in a Swedish Port (Nuit d’août dans un port de Suède), 1872. Oil on canvas, 51 × 78 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 374.

atmospheric moonlit effects created by textured brushwork have more in common with the work of this Swedish Barbizon painter. Şeker Ahmed Paşa must have been very familiar with both paintings that at one point were prominently hung near one another in Sultan Abdülhamid’s audience room in Yıldız Palace.34 Before his deposition in May 1876, Sultan Abdülaziz was active in the decisions about what was to be purchased for the palace collection. His intimate and sustained involvement with the earlier paintings commissioned from Chlebowski reveal the sultan’s personal passion for painting, and during his trip to Europe in 1867 he is known to have admired the work of contemporary French artists such as Meissonier that hung at the French Salon that year.35 An article in the Levant Herald on April 8, 1875, reveals that at the same time the sultan was commissioning works from Boulanger and Gérôme, his aides-de-camp Nouri Bey and Ahmed Bey were presenting paintings from their own collections to the sultan. One of these, it was noted, was an historical painting of combat between the Moors and the Spaniards in Andalusia during the time of Moorish occupation of the peninsula.36 This demonstrates that paintings were of such interest to the sultan that they were perceived to be worthy currency as gifts offered by the palace elites in order to secure the sultan’s favor. From his knowledge of Chlebowski’s experience, Gérôme was well aware that the sovereign was an assiduous patron, energetically and exhaustively involved in decisions about works created for his collection. Gérôme’s letter makes it clear that he awaited the sultan’s approbation of his own painting sent to the palace: “As I wish to leave the Sultan completely free, I will see that he is told that if the painting is not to his liking, either because of the manner in which I have treated the subject, or because of the price, or for any other reason, he has only to send it back to me purely and simply for, as I make sure that my works are dearly paid for, I want those who own them to be happy to have them, even if they’re Sultans.”37 It is clear that within this international patronage network the sultan was the ultimate arbiter of the purchases. A comparison of documents in the Istanbul archives and the company’s stock books, held at the Getty Research Institute, has enabled me to identify over thirty paintings that entered the palace collection in this way.38 From the stock books, which record both the cost price to Goupil et Cie and the sale price to the sultan, it is also evident that in some instances (although not consistently) the firm charged the palace considerably more than their other customers in Europe and America, with a markup that was often around one hundred percent. The record of the company’s acquisition and sale dates in these ledgers indicates that some works were drawn from stock that had been in the company’s holdings for up to three years (which was a considerable length of time for a company that had a high turnover). Yet by no means was the firm only shifting their old stock. In fact, a number of the paintings purchased in 1875 (such as Charles Chaplin’s Roses de mai and Guiseppe de Nittis’s La Place de la Concorde) had been exhibited in the Salon that year and enthusiastically reviewed by a range of critics, including Émile Zola. The palace was purchasing popular contemporary art. In accord with Goupil’s highly lucrative business model, a number of these paintings

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Figure 63. William Bouguereau, Italian Women at the Fountain (Italiennes à la fontaine). Engraving from Art Journal (New York) 1, New Series (1875): 87. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, N1.A52 Set1.

were reproduced as prints before they were sold to the sultan, and some continued to be reprinted in Goupil publications in the decades ahead. Bouguereau’s Italiennes à la fontaine (fig. 63) was published in the New York Art Journal in 1875 and Roses de mai was included in the Goupil illustrated catalogue in the same year. The Chaplin, Boulanger, and de Nittis paintings held in the Ottoman palace collection were reproduced as photogravures in the lavishly illustrated four-volume book Les Artistes Modernes, published in 1881 with illustrations provided by the Goupil company.39 Other works were replicated by the artist and sold to Goupil’s other clients in Europe and the United States.40 While the first version of Boulanger’s Intérieur Pompéien (Le Gynécée) was sold to the sultan in 1875, a smaller replica of the same painting was sold to the firm’s American client

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Figure 64. Pierre-Auguste Cot, Springtime (Printemps), c. 1873. Oil on canvas. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Atatürk Müze Köşk Koleksiyonu, Ankara, Inv. No. 145.

the Honorable A. G. Cattell in 1881.41 The reverse was the case with Cot’s painting Prin­ temps. In January 1876 the sultan purchased a quarter-size replica of the original that had been sold through the firm after it was exhibited in the Salon of 1873 (fig. 64).42 The full-size painting was purchased by American businessman John Wolfe and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection (fig. 65) (the firm sold at least three other copies of this very popular painting).43 Thus the sultan’s paintings were part of Goupil’s international network of image replication and circulation.44

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Figure 65. Pierre-Auguste Cot, Springtime (Printemps), 1873. Oil on canvas, 213.4 × 127 cm. Gift of Steven and Alexandra Cohen, 2012 (2012.575). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY.

The Ottoman palace acquisitions in the mid-1870s invite comparison with the collecting practices of the famous Ottoman statesman, Halil Bey (Halil Şerif Paşa), who had amassed his substantial collection of contemporary and old master European paintings in the previous decade. The Ottoman palace focused solely on contemporary painting, favoring academic art and Barbizon landscapes, and their selection did not include any of the more outré French avant-garde paintings (hardly surprising given the Gérôme-Goupil conduit), but this difference should not be overemphasized. Michèle

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Haddad’s scholarship on the full scope of Halil Bey’s acquisitions is a crucial corrective to the tendency to characterize his collection on the basis of a few notorious paintings, especially those by Gustave Courbet.45 In fact, a number of the same fashionable contemporary academic artists—​including Boulanger, Charles Daubigny, Gérôme, and Constant Troyon—​are represented in the two collections. Halil Bey’s collection, Francis Haskell asserted, “could not in essence be distinguished from that of any other rich man living in Paris at the time,” and therein lies its potential as a corrective to European Orientalist stereotypes about the Easterner.46 A similar conclusion might be ventured about the collection accrued in the Ottoman palace in 1875–​76. Yet what they signified for an elite Ottoman audience was inflected by the particular circumstances of the Ottoman context. De Nittis’s Place de la Concorde (fig. 56) is an intriguing case in point.47 Exhibited at the Salon of 1875, de Nittis’s painting entered the palace collection in October of that year.48 For the French, this square was one of modern Paris’s highly symbolic, politically resonant sites: the stage for monarchical ceremony and bloody social conflict. Each regime since Louis XV had invested in its transformation, renaming the site and replacing or reinterpreting its sculptural program.49 De Nittis’s painting captures the grandeur of the square while eschewing its semantic instability (in this respect it differs dramatically from Edgar Degas’s contemporaneous rendition of the same site, fig. 66).50 De Nittis’s view unfolds from a low vantage point that distends the pavement foreground and creates a delightful field for impressionist effects on the square’s watery surface as Parisians of varying social classes transit through one of the city’s busy axes. The Luxor Obelisk is the composition’s central vertical anchor. It was installed in the square in 1836 as part of Louis Phillippe’s program for the space. As Todd Porterfield argues, in these politically tumultuous decades, the obelisk was perceived to be a sufficiently neutral monument, shifting symbolic focus from internal revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggle to herald French imperialism.51 It recalled the deep time of ancient Egyptian history and a Roman imperial tradition of relocating obelisks as trophies of conquest. On its base, prominent gold inscriptions (too prominent in this painting according to one of the Salon critics) celebrated the modern French engineering feat of its relocation from Luxor to Paris.52 The events celebrated by the installation of this obelisk had quite different political resonances for the Ottoman state. French political expansion into Ottoman territory in Egypt had been checked by an Ottoman alliance with the British in 1801, the result of which saw the rise of Muḥammad ʻAlī Pasha (Mehmed Ali Pasha), who at the height of his powers threatened the Ottoman state. For the Ottoman leadership, this gift of the obelisk from the Egyptian Pasha to France was probably a reminder of Muḥammad ʻAlī’s political ambitions because he was known to have used archaeological gifts as a tool of international diplomacy.53 Yet this Parisian square had other more recent political resonances for Sultan Abdülaziz in 1875. De Nittis’s painting that celebrates urban life and Parisian city planning no doubt

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Figure 66. Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde (Viscount Lepic and His Daughters Crossing the Place de la Concorde), c. 1875. Oil on canvas, 78.4 × 117.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Inv. No. ZK-1399. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

reminded the sultan of his visit to the French capital in 1867 and may have chimed with his initiatives to transform the Ottoman imperial capital, one of the key achievements of his reign. It has been argued that the emphasis on the city’s monuments in de Nittis’s Parisian street scenes, with their pictorial structure that consistently dramatizes an engagement with the monumental focal points of Haussmann’s urban design, was characteristic of foreign artists’ codification of the city and thus particularly sympathetic to the foreign visitor’s vantage point.54 In 1875, critic Jules Claretie interpreted de Nittis’s Place de la Concorde as the view of an acute foreign observer and, given the painting’s eventual destination in the sultan’s collection, he makes a prescient analogy, declaring that Neapolitan painter de Nittis “was as struck by our life . . . like a Parisian would be by a street of Constantinople or a Viccolo of Naples.”55 Claretie’s observation is suggestive of the potential appeal of this painting to the sultan, who like de Nittis was an outsider in the Parisian capital. But his comment about the value of viewing one’s own city anew through the outsider’s vantage point is also pertinent to the Ottoman sultans’ interest in foreign artists’ representations of their capital. During the reigns of Abdülaziz and Abdülhamid II numerous paintings of Istanbul by foreign expatriates such as Amadeo Preziosi, Fausto Zonaro (fig. 67), and many others entered the collec-

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Figure 67. Fausto Zonaro, Üsküdar Şemsi Paşa—​T he Maiden’s Tower, n.d. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 137.5 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 262.

tion, a local appropriation of Orientalist painting that has a contemporary counterpart in private Turkish collections of Istanbul city views.56 The sultan had been a particularly feted visitor to Paris in 1867, and de Nittis’s painting would have invoked the ceremonial transits through the Place de la Concorde. On three occasions the sultan’s cortége and that of Emperor Napoleon III moved through the square in elaborate ceremonies that affirmed the “concord” between France and the Ottoman Empire. The first was the sultan’s ceremonial transit upon arrival in Paris on July 1 when he traveled from the Gare de Lyon to the Élysée palace; the second, on the following day, was the occasion of the award ceremony for the Paris International Exposition (fig. 68); and the third on July 9 was a military review held in his honor. These extravagant displays of diplomatic ceremony, described at length in the newspaper accounts, must have also made quite an impression on the young Prince Abdülhamid, who traveled in the sultan’s carriage.57 When the prince himself became sultan he made state ceremonials, including the visits of European heads of state, a particular feature of his long reign.58 When it hung in the Dolmabahçe Palace, de Nittis’s Parisian street scene probably also had local resonances for Sultan Abdülaziz and his Ottoman statesmen, given that their own efforts to transform the Ottoman capital had developed with such a keen awareness of the Parisian approach to city planning. In the nineteenth century, Istanbul’s urban renewal was more piecemeal and sporadic than Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris under Napoleon III but, as Zeynep Çelik has demonstrated, the early

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Figure 68. Distribution of Awards to Prize Winners at the Universal Exhibition . . . (Distribution des récompenses aux lauréats de l’Exposition universelle . . . ). From L’Illustration, Journal Universel 50, no. 1272 (July 13, 1867): 21. Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections, Fisher Library, University of Sydney (DN 031).

years of the sultan’s reign, between 1865 and 1869, were the century’s most active period of systematic redevelopment.59 Prompted by the devastating Hocapaşa fire of 1865, the state embarked on an ambitious urban renewal program for the historic peninsula. This included the enlargement of the central artery through the old city, the Divanyolu, and clearing space around key monuments to ensure the increased visibility of the city’s historic buildings, obelisks, and columns within this modern urbanscape. The axis created by the obelisk and two fountains, which the viewer approaches from an oblique angle in de Nittis’s painting, is reminiscent of the spina in Istanbul’s Hippodrome—​w ith its serpentine column flanked by the obelisk of Thutmosis III and the Walled Obelisk (fig. 69). The Ottoman imperial capital’s much older public square had been a long-standing site for Ottoman imperial ceremonies and military reviews and in 1863 was the chosen site for the city’s first international exhibition. There were earlier works within the Ottoman palace collection celebrating events held in this square, including François Dubois’s Parade of Asâkir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye (Victorious Troops of Muhammad) (fig. 70).60 The two obelisks feature prominently along with the Grand Imperial Mosque of Sultan Ahmed I in this panoramic vista of an imperial military parade. The former

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Figure 69. Sébah, Hippodrome, 1880. Albumen print, 18.5 × 25.2 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14). Figure 70. François Dubois, Parade of Asâkir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye (Victorious Troops of Muhammad), n.d. Oil on canvas, 86.5 × 100 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1482.

Figure 71. Pierre Olivier Joseph Coomans, Rewards (Récompenses), 1874. Oil on panel, 69 × 52 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 13 / 4.

hippodrome is transformed into a vast parade ground. Orderly rows of Sultan Mahmud II’s new troops are rendered along the orthogonals that converge near the entrance to the mosque. The legitimacy of the sultan’s new military troops, the “Victorious Troops of Muhammad” (Asâkir-i Mansûre’i Muhammediye), is thus rendered into the pictorial structure of this painting. The acquisition from the Goupil firm of three paintings of Pompeian interiors for the sultan’s collection shifts our focus from considerations about the role of antiquity in the redesign of public space in the modern Ottoman imperial capital to an engagement with an Ottoman historical imaginary of domestic life in the ancient Mediterranean world. Boulanger’s Intérieur Pompéien (Le Gynécée), Coomans’s Récompenses (Rewards) (fig. 71), and Scifoni’s Tepidarium Pompéien exemplify an impulse to reanimate the antique through a blend of scholarly erudition and imagined domestic life that appealed to bourgeois audiences in nineteenth-century Europe. All three works offered a mode of

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engagement with that past, as Jules Claretie so perspicaciously phrased it, via “l’antiquité surprise dans sa vie intime.”61 The entry of these paintings into the sultan’s collection in 1875 occasions historical speculation about their significance for elite Ottoman palace viewers within the context of a changing Ottoman historical worldview characterized by an increasing interest in the ancient Roman world around the Mediterranean, both within and outside Ottoman imperial domains. In Coomans’s Récompenses a pyramidal compositional format is created by the entwined bodies of this mother and her two children (one of whom playfully reaches up to grasp the grapes that are held beyond reach while the other at the mother’s feet enjoys the rewards of this game). This pictorial structure imbues the trifling scene of withheld and sated pleasures with an ennobling clarity and sculptural monumentality matched by the rich, saturated colors of the Pompeian interior behind. This interior in the third wall painting style is an amalgam of several remnant paintings that were illustrated in the nineteenth-century scholarly sources on the Pompeian excavations.62 Boulanger’s Intérieur Pompéien (Le Gynécée) (fig. 55) offers a more elaborate narrative of private life in ancient Pompeii in a scene governed by the presence of the paterfamilias. It too combines scholarly rigor with dramatic invention in this incidental moment of daily life in a patrician household, although the Salon critics were divided as to the propriety of this subject. In his sensationalist response, Véron wrote that “this highly skilled painter is content with pretty scenes of Roman lust” as “all the seductions and provocations of sensual form beguile the gaze of anyone looking at this dangerously beautiful canvas,” while others, including Zola, interpreted it as a more benign domestic scene.63 And certainly the poem, replete with erudite classical references, that accompanied its publication in the Goupil Album of Salon paintings (1875) elaborated the quotidian narrative that unfolds within this painting.64 Under a Corinthian peristyle, at the entry to this private courtyard, a curtain is pushed aside by a household attendant as the patriarch of the family crosses this threshold. Greeted by the loyal family dog, his attention remains focused on the tablet in hand. In this transitional space he is not yet diverted from these serious matters pertaining to public life by the familial distractions that unfold in the courtyard in front of him. Under the cooling shade in the center of the atrium the recumbent senior woman of this household gazes solicitously at the child’s play taking place in the pool in front of her. Through her, our attention is directed to the three children who are absorbed by the movement of the miniature boat, a trireme, that partially breaks the surface of the pool as it glides toward the fountain in its center. It is just beyond the reach of the pointer used by the young boy, who strains to propel this vessel as far as possible into the depths of the pool. The trireme is pictorially linked to the family’s patriarch by the reflection of his robes in this part of the pool’s glassy surface. This child’s play is thus a whimsical reference to the maritime trade links across the Mediterranean that sustained this patrician household, the Roman colony of Pompeii, and surrounding towns located around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD.65

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The carpet in Boulanger’s Gynécée and the African slave seated on it, like the flatweave on the couch in Coomans’s painting (an anachronistic inclusion), underscores the prosaic impact on daily life in the ancient Roman world of commercial exchanges between East and West across the Mediterranean.66 Like other French artists such as Chassériau, this emphasis on the expanded horizons of Roman antiquity around the Mediterranean in the work of Coomans and Boulanger was no doubt fueled by their travels to North Africa where they encountered Roman ruins.67 But in any case Pompeii had already played a role in a “new definition of the antique” within European culture.68 The discovery of these sites in the eighteenth century expanded contemporary understandings of the geographic horizons of the antique world and provoked a more inclusive artistic canon of the antique. Moreover, these outposts of the Roman Empire, whose visual culture showed signs of Egyptian influences, were “understood to bring together the disparate histories of the Greco-Roman and Egyptian.”69 This historical lineage came to serve teleological European imperial narratives as Western European nations laid claim to the legacy of Mediterranean civilizations. In the same period, the Ottoman state and its leading intellectuals were also making this ancient past their own: both quite literally, through the legislative developments from 1869 onward that legally regulated archaeological activities within Ottoman territory, but also conceptually.70 As Ussama Makdisi puts it, the latter part of the century saw increased emphasis on the empire’s historical diversity, a “reorientation of the empire away from a strictly Islamic metaphorical universe” where “Ottoman claims to the pre-Islamic past were an integral part of a project of imperial renewal.” 71 The stringent Ottoman bylaw of February 1869, Edhem Eldem argues, was the legislative move that signaled a new era in Ottoman archaeology by unequivocally asserting the state’s legal mandate to prohibit the export of antiquities except where an imperial İrade had been granted. It was the first of a number of legislative interventions designed to systematically regulate archaeological activities within Ottoman territory and prohibit the unfettered export of antiquities to the West. This legislation was a response to the state’s concern over abuses by Englishman John Turtle Wood during his excavations at Ephesus. In the decades ahead Ottoman archaeology developed apace. Spearheaded by Osman Hamdi in his role as director of the Ottoman Imperial Museum, the state was now not only playing a powerful regulatory role but also participating in the scholarly dialogue about the ever-increasing archaeological evidence of cultures of the ancient Near East. Edhem Eldem has characterized this as an Ottoman “desire to play the Great Game on equal terms with the major European states of the time.” 72 The entry of these paintings of Pompeii into the palace collection six years after the 1869 bylaw can be understood as part of the same impulse to engage with the heritage of a pre-Islamic past around the Mediterranean, this time through artistic representation of archaeological discoveries outside Ottoman territory. As numerous scholars have noted, the appeal of such paintings for a French audience hinged on the ways in which they brought the temporally and geographically distant Roman past into imag-

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ined intimate proximity to contemporary audiences through these pictorial exercises of domestic reanimation. This impulse to domesticate the ancient past is evident in the critic Fizelière’s response to Boulanger’s painting. He speculates that contemporary viewers saw in this Roman interior the Parisians of Auguste Toulmouche (the wellknown painter of contemporary Parisian society). He hastens to add that this rendition of a Roman lady of fashion reassured contemporary Parisian gentlemen that they had nothing to envy in antique beauty.73 So too, I aver, these paintings made the classical past in the ancient Mediterranean available for the imaginary projection of an educated elite Ottoman audience. And it would not have necessarily required a great deal of scholarly erudition for the respectable domesticity of this secluded gynaeceum populated by the master and his multiracial household to have resonated for some of those who lived within the seclusion of the Ottoman private quarters. Works purchased for the palace were not just envisaged as a collection to be enjoyed by elite Ottomans. Both Sultan Abdülaziz and Sultan Abdülhamid II understood the strategic value of demonstrating their cultural affiliations with Europe through the display of their art in the official reception rooms of the palaces. And it would be misleading to make judgments about the Ottoman palace collecting priorities on the basis of the Gérôme-Goupil acquisitions alone. Rather they should be assessed, as Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur argue, alongside the range of artworks that Sultan Abdülaziz commissioned from visiting European painters, Istanbul’s expatriates, and contemporary Ottoman artists (fig. 72 and fig. 73). This collection continued to be augmented by Sultan Abdülhamid II throughout his long reign.74 Abdülhamid seems to have been particularly attuned to the way the palace art collection could be utilized in the service of contemporary statecraft and international diplomacy.75 One of his court painters, the Italian Fausto Zonaro, records in his memoirs that the sultan entrusted him with the task of selecting and displaying appropriate paintings from the palace collection for the rooms that Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiserin Augusta Viktoria would see during their state visit in 1898. Zonaro’s choices were governed by aesthetic preferences. Among his inclusions were many of the paintings purchased through the Goupil firm (including Gérôme’s work). Zonaro was later dismayed to find that his selection was edited by the sultan himself, whose alternative judgments were premised on diplomatic criteria. Abdülhamid vetoed the work by the painter Ivan Aivazovsky on the grounds that his German visitors might be offended to see so many Russian paintings.76 In the twentieth century these paintings were lost to view to scholars of French art, but this was certainly not the case in the nineteenth century. As already mentioned, a number of these paintings subsequently circulated internationally as prints, while others were replicated for clients in America. So too, some of the artists recalled that their paintings were in the Ottoman palace collection. Gérôme in particular kept his paintings for the sultan in mind and indeed valued them so highly that he sought permission from the Ottoman ruler to temporarily return them to Europe on the occasion of the Paris international exposition of 1878. The cross-cultural mobility of this work,

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Figure 72. Abdullah Frères, Palace Interior, n.d. Albumen print, 19.7 × 25.8 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14). Figure 73. Detail of fig. 72. The painting shown is Ivan Aivazovsky, Landscape, 1861 (National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 597).

Figure 74. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Lion in Its Lair (Lion dans sa grotte), 1875. Oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Atatürk Müze Köşk Koleksiyonu, Ankara, Inv. No. 341.

both the paintings and their prints, reveals the mutable semiotic of his Orientalism, and specifically in Istanbul the ways they were transmuted into Ottoman Orientalism. The three works by Gérôme that were purchased for the sultan are Lion dans sa grotte (fig. 74), Café égyptien (fig. 75), and Bachi-Bouzouk dansant (fig. 76). Two are listed as lost in Gerald M. Ackerman’s revised catalogue raisonné, but, in fact, all three remain in Turkish national collections.77 As early as April 8, 1875, it was reported in the Levant Herald that the French academician had received a painting commission from Sultan Abdülaziz.78 Telegrams in the Dolmabahçe Palace archives indicate that by November 1875 two of the three commissioned paintings had entered the palace collection, with the third still under negotiation via Goupil and the painter himself. As Ackerman notes, two paintings, Lion dans sa grotte and Bachi-Bouzouk dansant, were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris between May and November 1878. Documents in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul indicate that the French Embassy in Istanbul negotiated on Gérôme’s behalf with the Ottoman foreign affairs ministry in April 1878 for the loan of these two paintings and that permission was granted by Sultan Abdülhamid for them to

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Figure 75. Jean-Léon Gérôme, An Egyptian Café (Café égyptien), c. 1876. Oil on canvas, 35.5 × 27 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 380.

Figure 76. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk Dancing (Bachi-Bouzouk dansant), 1875. Oil on canvas, 63 × 80 cm. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Atatürk Müze Köşk Koleksiyonu, Ankara, Inv. No. 3046.

travel back to Paris for the duration of this event.79 Given the extensive effort required to repatriate these paintings for the purposes of this exhibition, one wonders why Gérôme opted for such a complicated loan. It is tempting to speculate that the painter sought to bolster his Orientalist credentials through recognition that his paintings belonged to the sultan. The loan source, however, was not acknowledged in the official catalogue, and it was not until the publication of Fanny Hering’s monograph in 1892 that the provenance of one of them, Lion dans sa grotte, was publicly disclosed.80 Gérôme’s letter about this matter to Osman Hamdi Bey’s father İbrahim Edhem Paşa in October 1877, whom he was petitioning to assist him with the palace loan, reveals how much Gérôme valued these works. He declares: “I put such care into these paintings, which are I think among the best works I have done.” It seems this is the reason he went to such trouble to secure them for this prestigious international event.81 On the other hand, one speculates as to the reasons why the Ottoman palace was willing to lend the works. Perhaps Sultan Abdülhamid understood the benefit of this high-profile recognition of Ottoman participation in the European practices of collecting and lending works of art. This is certainly consistent with the Ottoman state’s regular contributions to the international exhibitions held in Europe and America throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.82 Two of the three Gérôme paintings purchased for the Ottoman palace collection also had another life through their circulation as prints. In 1881 Café égyptien and BachiBouzouk dansant were published as photogravures in Edward Strahan (Earl Shinn’s) volume on the painter (fig. 77).83 This presents us with a fascinating puzzle and prompts questions as to the divergent contemporaneous significance of Gérôme’s Orientalism for both the Ottoman palace elite and for European and American audiences. My attention here is focused on the geographically disparate reception histories of one of these two: Bachi-Bouzouk dansant. When exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1878, Joseph Dubosc de Pesquidoux admired Gérôme’s vivid rendering of the picturesque costume of the “Bachi-Bozouks” whom he judged to be “less soldiers than bandits.”84 The painting received a more politically charged interpretation when reproduced as a photogravure in Strahan’s book. The accompanying text identified Gérôme’s figures as “brothers” of the irregular troops that fought alongside the Ottoman army in the 1877–​78 Russo-Ottoman War and who had been so controversial in the British accounts of this conflict. Strahan writes: [These Bashi-Bazouks are] gathered from the remotest quarters of the Empire in Europe and Asia. . . . Often with scarcely a pretence of military discipline among them, they imported into a war, professedly carried on under the regulations of the Geneva Convention, such atrocities as before long led the Russians to retaliate in kind. From the letters of the enterprising gentlemen who represented the English press in both armies, may be gathered the fullest details of the manners and customs of these picturesque pillagers, whom Gérôme here represents in a singularly innocent moment. . . . In the East, men may change, but manners do not, and these dancers and chicken-killers of Gérôme’s are the legitimate brothers of the soldiers of the Sultan, so vividly described by those letters from the field.85

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Figure 77. Goupil et Cie, after Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouks Dancing. Photogravure, 46 × 33 cm. From Gérôme: A Collection of the Works of J.L. Gérôme in One Hundred Photogravures, ed. Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn] (New York: Samuel L. Hall, 1881), vol. 3, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (81-B265 v.3).

Strahan endorses the view of this war reported in the British press: a strident critique of the Ottoman Empire because such lawlessness at the hands of the irregular troops was, by implication, sanctioned by the morally corrupt leadership of the Ottoman sultan. Strahan’s text assimilated the reported capricious behavior of the Bashi-Bazouks into the larger Ottoman political structures within which the exercise of arbitrary violence was reputedly given license. Such views of the ruthlessness of the Bashi-Bazouks had already been entrenched in the popular imagination. American and British reports about events leading up to the war stirred popular outrage in Britain and ensured that Disraeli’s pro-Ottoman policy could no longer be sustained. This was a decisive turning point in British foreign relations, ending the period of active support for the Ottoman Empire.86 Strahan’s characterization of the Bashi-Bazouks as symptomatic of the unchanging

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nature of “manners” in the East oversimplifies a far more complex and checkered history of the Ottoman state’s relationship with the irregular soldiers, who served alongside regular forces during many of the key nineteenth-century battles for the empire’s survival.87 In the context of Strahan’s volume, Gérôme’s painting performs a certain kind of ideological work, becoming a vehicle for historicizing these recent events in a way that justifies the shifts in British foreign policy and makes such an unsavory subject palatable to a Western audience by presenting these “bandits” as exotic and picturesque. In Gérôme’s painting the threatening implications of their formidable weaponry is muted and the most visible firearm is brandished by the dancer as a benign, picturesque accoutrement to his dance. Although the details of this historic moment are very particular, in essence this is a familiar interpretation of Gérôme’s Orientalism, one that accords with Linda Nochlin’s and Olivier Richon’s insights about the myth of Oriental despotism.88 Why would the Ottoman sultan have been engaged by such a painting? What alternative connotations might this representation have elicited for the elite Ottoman palace audience in the 1870s? In the first place, the figures in this painting were identified by a different name, Zeybeks. This is the title by which the painting was referred to in nineteenth-century Ottoman sources and by which it is still known in the Turkish archives. This designation was neither as generic, nor in the 1870s did it carry such negative connotations, as the term Bashi-Bazouk. An Ottoman viewer would have immediately recognized this painting as a representation of the distinctive costume and dance of the Zeybeks, from the mountain region of Western Anatolia. The Zeybeks had been part of the irregular Ottoman forces and indeed they had a troubled history with the Ottoman regime, but by the 1870s they were in favor with Sultan Abdülaziz even though the Zeybeks’ relationship with the state would continue to wax and wane as the century progressed.89 The Zeybeks’ fierce resistance to any measure to abolish their distinctive dress in 1838 gave them a particular notoriety.90 These dress reforms were part of the Tanzimat modernization of the Ottoman state. Prior to the reforms (first initiated in the late 1820s) the myriad sartorial distinctions in dress across the empire signaled diverse regional and sectarian allegiances, and the push to homogenize clothing was part of the modernization and increased centralization of the Ottoman state.91 By the 1870s the official attitude seems to have softened toward the Zeybeks, a change that coincided with shifts in late-Tanzimat state ideology, toward “Ottomanism,” an ideology that emphasized unity within diversity across the multiethnic, multireligious empire. This shift is evident in the Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye (Les costumes populaires de la Turquie), published as part of the Ottoman government’s contribution to the World’s Fair held in Vienna in 1873. Two Zeïbek (Zeybek) costumes were included in the section on Aïdin (Aydın) (fig. 78). The accompanying ethnographic account noted this fraught recent history of the Zeybeks’ relationship to the state but recouped this fiercely proud and sartorially idiosyncratic group as exemplars of successful centralized reform by recounting that the state’s representative in the vilayet had recently persuaded the Zeybeks to collaborate with the local

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Figure 78. Sébah, Zeïbek (Zeybek) costumes (figures 1 and 2, Aïdin section). 37 × 29 cm. From Osman Hamdy Bey and Marie de Launay, Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye (Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873), 1873. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14).

police. Instead of profiting from banditry, they reaped financial rewards by providing services as travelers’ escorts.92 Gérôme’s Zeybeks are not situated within an ethnographic classificatory rubric in such a determined way as the Zeybeks in the Elbise. As Ahmet Ersoy has argued, the Elbise was a project that systematically encompassed each of the Ottoman vilayets (starting with Istanbul, “in the heart of the Ottoman Empire”)93 to propose a geographic summary of the empire through costume. A crucial part of what allowed the Ottoman state to define its modernization as distinct from the West was premised on positioning “native culture” as the modernizing state’s timeless patrimony. A sartorial definition of this patrimony, Ersoy argues, is evident in the Elbise’s framing distinction between the continuity and integrity of local, traditional “costume” and the transience and superficiality of modern (European) “garments.”94 Ussama Makdisi pushes this a step further, arguing that the Elbise articulates Ottoman Orientalism,

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“a vision of Ottoman modernity,” defined by the Ottoman elite “that was hierarchical and imperial.”95 In this context the Zeybeks’ costume is representative of one element of regional “native culture” within the frame of a book that positions each within a classificatory mode by staging costumed pairs and trios against the same generic background. This and the frontal poses of each model in the Elbise contrast with the anecdotal mise-enscène of Gérôme’s painting and its figures who are entertained by their fireside companion, whose finely wrought costume is so splendidly animated by the movement of his dance. Their tethered horse in the background turns to look, perhaps stirred by the music and dancing of its masters. Its presence is a reminder that once the victuals have been consumed and the entertainment finished, the Zeybeks will move on. Here is rendered an itinerant existence that was the antithesis of Ottoman palace life governed by formality and protocol. Despite the differences between the Elbise project and the painting, the language of Gérôme’s academic realism lends an ethnographic sensibility; and their particular dance was recognized as one of their distinctive practices.96 It is tempting to think of the range of representations of Ottoman culture within the sultans’ art collection, which by the end of the nineteenth century came to include numerous paintings of Arab horsemen from the empire’s peripheries by Orientalists Eugène Fromentin, Georges Washington, and Gustave Boulanger, as performing something of a visual précis of the empire’s diversity for its elite audience. As such they were a reminder of cultural patrimony (that which distinguished the Ottoman Empire from Europe), within the contextualizing frame of the modern Ottoman palace. Such a configuration is evident in the Abdullah Frères’ photograph of the palace’s sumptuously appointed European-style dining room (fig. 79), where Boulanger’s Le Passage du gué hangs alongside a marine painting on the walls (fig. 80). Boulanger’s painting had earlier been such a favorite with the sultan that it inspired a request for the artist to create a pendant painting of an Arab woman with horse.97 As we examine this context and track the circulation of Gérôme’s painting from Paris to Istanbul to Paris and then back again and incorporate within the account the life of its reprographic double produced in America, the variant names that it accrued as a result of these transitions are indicative of the interpretive distinctions for its divergent audiences. Reassessing Gérôme’s Orientalism through sources that attune us to nineteenth-century Istanbul as a context for the reception of his art, we find ourselves at a considerable geographic and interpretive distance from where this chapter commenced. Understanding this context prompts a reconsideration of Linda Nochlin’s argument that “The white man, the Westerner, is of course always implicitly present in Orientalist paintings like Snake Charmer; his is necessarily the controlling gaze, the gaze which brings the Oriental world into being, the gaze for which it is ultimately intended.”98 My intention here is not to summarily dismiss Nochlin’s Saidean analysis of Gérôme’s art but rather to suggest that what is required is broader cross-cultural interpretive work. An approach that embraces a more contested and geographically encompassing production

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Figure 79. Abdullah Frères, Palace Interior, 1880. Albumen print, 19.9 × 25.8 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14). Figure 80. Detail of fig. 79. The painting shown is Boulanger, The River Crossing (Le passage du gué).

and reception history augments and nuances our understanding of the cultural politics of Gérôme’s Orientalism. So too, investigating the impact of Gérôme’s pedagogical relations on his Orientalist art, his entrepreneurial activities in Istanbul, and his role in that city’s Ottoman networks of art patronage reveals the ways his activities intersected with both Ottoman and Orientalist cultural agendas in the nineteenth century.

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4 ISTANBUL’S ART EXHIBITIONS

In the summer of 1880 a dispute broke out in the Istanbul press around a collaborative art exhibition held in Tarabya on the shores of the Bosporus. This controversy, between the Ottoman critic Abdullah Kâmil writing for Osmanlı and an anonymous reviewer for the local English-language paper the Constantinople Messenger, centered on how to characterize the artistic network that was formed through this event. Both claimants asserted the importance of this initiative for the development of an artistic community in Istanbul, but the precise terms of that alliance were fiercely disputed. The issue at stake in this contested politics of display was how to construe the geopolitical allegiances of the varied participants and thus the overall significance of the event. On the one hand the critic for the English-language newspaper defined it as a collaboration forged from distinct national entities because the exhibition included “English, French, Italian, German, Belgian, Greek, Armenian and Turkish artists.”1 Strenuously rejecting this characterization, the Ottoman critic Abdullah Kâmil counterclaimed that the event was an “Ottoman exhibition,” because “nothing else but Ottoman themes could be seen there.”2 He reclassified the participants into the broader categories of Ottoman and non-Ottoman, insistently incorporating the Muslim Ottoman and non-Muslim Ottoman-Armenian artists within the first category. The heated nature of this debate about which terms properly represented the geopolitical allegiances of the exhibition’s participants can be interpreted in the broader context of contemporary international relations, specifically disputes about the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. In emphasizing separate national identities,

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the English-language critic assumed a position that was antagonistic to the Ottoman critic, who responded by asserting “Ottoman” as a more expansive category. Invoked in this context by a member of the empire’s elite, the term expresses the ideal of an overarching Ottoman identity encompassing the empire’s heterogeneous religious, ethnic, and regional groups.3 Such questions of classification were particularly charged for the Ottoman state in this period in the face of ongoing and urgent territorial threats to the empire. As a result of the recent Russo-Ottoman war and the Congress of Berlin of 1878, Şükrü Hanioğlu argues that “[in this decade] European and Ottoman interpretations of the empire’s territorial integrity had never been further apart.” The most dramatic impact of these events for the Ottomans resulted from a shift in British foreign policy that signaled “the end of active British support for the Ottoman Empire.”4 The Ottoman writer’s strenuous rejection of proposed national categories within the Istanbul exhibition can be understood in the context of these recent events. It explains why he reconfigures the network according to the prevailing supranational ideology of Ottomanism that asserts unity within a multireligious and multiethnic Ottoman Empire; i.e., an ideological buttress for maintaining the empire’s territorial diversity. Following the contours of this argument, the lines of this dispute are drawn around two seemingly incompatible characterizations of the artistic network: Ottoman versus Orientalist. A closer study of this and other nineteenth-century Istanbul exhibitions, however, reveals a more complex set of engagements that cut across any dualistic interpretation of cultural alliances. I will argue that these Istanbul collaborations require a more complex understanding of network relations, which takes into account not just broader national allegiances but also cross-cultural connections premised on the pedagogic, gender-based, and local alliances that intersected and at times cut across these broader political categories. An approach that emphasizes networks shifts us away from the tendency to conceptualize national cultures as circumscribed or self-contained entities and instead focuses our critical attention on nodes of cross-cultural contact. This does not evacuate considerations of power from the analysis of these Istanbul art exhibitions. It does, however, construe the cultural field in terms of a more decentered and contested model of power relations and focuses us on the historical moments and particular sites where cross-cultural alliances were formed and renegotiated. Such an approach, I contend, allows us to better understand the complexity of interactions that took place in the sphere of visual culture in the “contact zone” between Ottoman painters, visiting Europeans, European resident artists, and non-Muslim Ottomans in the capital of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. The initiative for this exhibition in 1880 in Tarabya, and the one the following year in Pera, came from the Reverend George Washington, the Anglican priest attached to Istanbul’s British Embassy. The first exhibition prompted the formation of the “ABC club,” a suitably germinal acronym that encompassed the local nature of this collaborative venture in its full title—​t he Artists of the Bosphorus and Constantinople. A rudimentary catalog accompanied both exhibitions.5 Washington’s idea of an art society for

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Istanbul was modeled on the amateur clubs that flourished in England, and its primary aim was rather loosely constituted as a “means for mutual improvement” for those involved.6 The initiative was enthusiastically received by the critic for the Constantinople Messenger, who saw it as a springboard for fostering “culture, artistic taste, and ability” among “Constantinople society” which, the critic claimed, “knows very little about itself or what it is really worth, owing to the fact of its being split up into colonies, and again into subdivisions of those colonies.” 7 The event was as much part of the world of diplomatic relations as of visual culture, with the presence of the French and British embassies prominently manifested. The current British deputation was well represented in the organizing committee, while Albion’s diplomatic lineage in the city was celebrated in the exhibition through a portrait of former ambassador Sir Henry Layard. The British contributors were primarily long-term Istanbul residents. They included affiliates of the British Embassy (Reverend George Washington and his wife) and other members of the Anglican Church community such as Charles Curtis, chaplain of Galata’s Crimean Memorial Church, and his sister Mary Adelaide Walker. The legal fraternity was also involved through the inclusion of paintings by Edwin Pears, who was appointed to the European bar in Istanbul in 1873.8 So too the exhibitions included wives of those who had established careers as Ottoman state employees, for example Edith Katherine Hobart-Hampden. She was the wife of Hobart Paşa, who had served in the Ottoman navy from 1867. The exhibitor referred to only by his surname “Robertson” was James Robertson, the painter and renowned photographer who had been the chief engraver of the Ottoman Imperial Mint from the early 1840s.9 Despite their importance in Istanbul’s art community, none of these amateur artists, with the exception of Robertson, have been included in recent exhibitions of nineteenthcentury Orientalism. The French legation was also represented at the highest local levels in these Istanbul exhibitions, with the ambassador himself, Tissot, exhibiting sixteen sketches of Morocco. The opening ceremony underscored such foreign diplomatic networks through the presence of these and other European national representatives.10 While the rituals of the 1880s exhibitions signaled their connection to the domain of foreign affairs and their integration within Istanbul’s expatriate communities, they were preceded, and perhaps inspired, by two exhibitions in the 1870s that were embedded in Ottoman cultural politics. Although these two earlier exhibitions were not directly under the auspices of the palace or the Ottoman state, their organizer, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, the Ottoman painter, former student of Gérôme and Boulanger, and later aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdülaziz, had made strategic overtures that ensured the exhibition openings were well attended by senior Ottoman bureaucrats.11 Portraits of Sultan Abdülaziz (fig. 81) and his son Şehzade Yusuf İzzeddin Efendi were prominent in these exhibitions and, in 1875, the Ottoman state provided the venue, the Dârülfünûn University building.12 Kargopoulo’s photograph of the Tombeau du Sul. Mahmoud (fig. 2) shows that the presence of the Resim Sergisi / Exposition des Beaux Arts in the Dârülfünûn building was promoted by a sign in Ottoman and French that was prominently displayed on the

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Figure 81. Pierre Désiré Guillemet, Sultan Abdülaziz, 1873. Oil on canvas, 140 × 93 cm. © Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, Inv. No. TSM 17 / 943.

corner of the building, visible from the busy thoroughfare the Divanyolu (fig. 3). At the sultan’s request, works from the 1875 exhibition were brought to the palace to enable his closer inspection. The reviewer for La Turquie also noted that awards from the palace had been promised which were intended to encourage the development of painting in the Ottoman capital.13 As Mustafa Cezar argues, these exhibitions were part of a lineage of palace support that was crucial to the emergence of easel painting in the public sphere in the Ottoman capital and thus were important in the development of modern Turkish painting.14 Such high-level Ottoman support for the exhibitions of 1873 and 1875 contrasts with the 1880s exhibitions which, judging from press reportage, did not inspire, nor did the organizers solicit, the same level of official Ottoman engagement.

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One could argue that these divisions between foreign diplomatic and Ottoman elite support are also mirrored in the spatial logic of the exhibition venues, with the first two organized by the Ottoman painter in the precincts of the old city and the second two, in the hands of Istanbul’s foreign residents, located in the spaces of the city associated with these foreign communities.15 So too each exhibition was held in institutional contexts that aligned them with the broader interests of these respective groups. The first two, held at the School of Arts and Trades in Sultanahmet and the university, were locations that allied these art initiatives with contemporaneous Ottoman education reform. They had been preceded by a range of exhibitions of student work organized by the military school and the Women’s Teacher Training College.16 Ahmed Ali Bey was an art teacher at the Sultanahmet School of Arts and Trades when the exhibition was held there in 1873.17 As well as exhibiting drawings from students at his school, the 1873 exhibition also displayed, according to La Turquie, work from students at the School of Medicine and the Galatasaray High School.18 Reviews of this exhibition in the Ottoman newspapers link it to ambitions to establish a state-sponsored Academy of Art in the Ottoman capital.19 Ahmed Ali Bey’s repeated public calls in the Ottoman and expatriate newspapers for the city’s established artists to submit works to these exhibitions reveal his ambitions for these events beyond a role as venues for Ottoman student work.20 The conjunction of paintings that Ahmed Ali himself submitted in 1875, a suite of portraits, landscapes, and still-life paintings, affirms his vision for these new initiatives in Ottoman painting developing from a transposed European pedagogic practice and fostered by Ottoman royal patronage. After initial art training at the Istanbul military school, Ahmed Ali was the beneficiary of palace support for art training in Paris where he resided from 1864 until 1871.21 His work at the 1875 exhibition was a public display of the benefits of that education. He exhibited a copy of a portrait of Sultan Mahmud II (reputedly by Franz Xaver Winterhalter),22 thus invoking earlier palace support for the public display of easel painting. Mahmud II (r. 1808–​39), father of reigning Sultan Abdülaziz, was remembered for his audacious (and controversial) initiative of publicly displaying his own portrait on the walls of official buildings across the empire and for the Tasvîr-i Hümâyûn, where the sultan’s miniature portrait for the first time was to be worn on the person of the Ottoman officials on whom it was bestowed.23 Ahmed Ali’s copy of Sultan Mahmud’s portrait was accompanied by a work that paid homage to his teacher Gustave Boulanger—​a copy of his painting Le passage du gué (fig. 82), a romanticized vision of Bedouin nomads. It was probably derived from Boulanger’s painting of the same title that entered the palace collection around this time and hung on the palace walls in the decades ahead (fig. 79 and fig. 80). Like Osman Hamdi’s paintings of Baghdad displayed in the same exhibition (of which fig. 83 is a later example), Ahmed Ali’s copy demonstrated that the young cosmopolitan Ottoman artist had assimilated the language of academic art learned in Paris to represent the

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Figure 82. Gustave-Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger, The River Crossing (Le passage du gué), n.d. Oil on canvas, 51.5 × 68 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 12 / 2575. Figure 83. Osman Hamdi, View of Baghdad (Sitti Zübeyde Türbesi), 1884. Oil on canvas, 60 × 120 cm. Halil İbrahim İper Koleksiyonu, Istanbul.

Figure 84. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Alemdağ Landscape, n.d. Oil on canvas, 85 × 126 cm. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Atatürk Müze Köşk Koleksiyonu, Ankara, Inv. No. 7234.

empire’s peripheries. But Orientalist genre scenes were not a theme that Ahmed Ali pursued in his art, despite being trained by two renowned French Orientalists. The original canvases that Ahmed Ali exhibited in 1875 are of subjects he would favor for the rest of his career. He exhibited three Istanbul landscapes and one still life. The Istanbul landscapes were of Göksu (known to Europeans as the Sweet Waters of Asia, it was a site often depicted by European Orientalists) and the Alemdağ forest clearing (fig. 84), and of local woodlands inspired by paintings he had done in the forest of Fontainebleau and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1869 and 1870.24 Ahmed Ali’s inclusion of his Boulanger copy at the Istanbul exhibition was thus not evidence of a sustained commitment to Ottoman Orientalism; instead it was an affirmation of rigorous academic art training where copying was part of pedagogic practice. It also publicly demonstrated the importance of having such accomplished paintings on hand in the Ottoman capital as an inspiration for young artists and affirmed the value of the palace acquisitions that Ahmed Ali was negotiating on behalf of the sultan in 1875. Thus, the conjunction of portraits, landscapes, and still-life paintings Ahmed Ali exhibited in 1875 reveals his own artistic predilections as well as underscoring the patronal affiliations and pedagogic practices that he felt were necessary to aid the development of Ottoman art.

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Whereas these 1870s exhibitions were embedded in a state-sponsored Ottoman pedagogic context and reflected their organizer’s aspirations for modern Ottoman art, by 1880 the initiative for the exhibitions had shifted to the city’s foreign expatriate community. The venue for the 1880 exhibition was the Greek School for Girls, a private educational institution in Tarabya, the Bosporus village where the summer residences of the British and French legations were located. The Pera exhibition of 1881 was held in an entertainment venue in the Tepebaşı Municipal Gardens.25 Yet pursuing a rigidly dualistic reading of these four exhibitions is too simplistic in terms of the spatial divisions of the Ottoman capital which, as Zeynep Çelik has argued, do not conform to the divisions of other colonial cities.26 Although the differing institutional contexts and nationalities of the organizers are significant, there was a complex mixture of exhibitors and a significant continuity of both Ottoman painters and foreign resident artists at each event. So too, it is clear that the organizers of all these exhibitions, in light of the dual signage advertising the venue in Ottoman and French, conceived of their audience as encompassing both Ottomans and foreigners. Also for the duration of the exhibition in 1881, a specific time was designated on a Saturday for attendance by women only, in order to encourage Muslim women visitors.27 This highlights the limitations of dichotomous thinking in relation to these Istanbul exhibitions. I would argue that it was the very openness of the structure of the event in 1880 that led to the claims and counterclaims in the local press about the geopolitical alliances of its participants that I cited at the beginning of this chapter. Further exploration of the precise terms of the Ottoman critic’s response to this exhibition enables insights into these intersecting networks. Responding to the Constantinople Messenger’s division of the exhibition participants into separated national entities, the Osmanlı reviewer reclassified the artists as Ottoman and non-Ottoman. Where the foreign language newspaper claimed only two Turkish participants, Princess Nazlı Hanım and Osman Hamdi Bey, the Osmanlı critic contested this narrow categorization, objecting to the assumption that “a non-Muslim cannot be Ottoman,” citing in evidence that “even though some of these people are not Muslim they have nevertheless become Ottoman state employees.” At issue here were the Ottoman-Armenian painters, and the three encompassed within this rubric were Verjin Serviçen, Krikor Köçeoğlu, and Boğos Şaşyan. Verjin Serviçen exhibited a portrait of her father, whom the Ottoman critic noted was a member of the Senate,28and in doing so this critic made a claim for the inclusiveness of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of non-Muslim political representation (fig. 85 and fig. 86, the latter a photograph of Dr. Serviçen).29 The second artist, Krikor Köçeoğlu, was associated with the revival of Kufic script and he exhibited calligraphy in this style.30 Both he and the third artist, Boğos Şaşyan, had collaborated on the Usul-i Mi‘mari-i ‘Osmani (L’architecture ottomane) project for the Ottoman Pavilion at the 1873 Vienna exhibition. Ahmet Ersoy characterizes this project as expressing “in distinctly architectural terms, the Tanzimat’s official

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Figure 85. Members of the Central Committee of the Red Crescent (Membres du Comité central du Croissant Rouge), 1878. Album page, 36 × 48.5 cm. From Album of the Ottoman Society for Aid to Injured Servicemen, 1877–​1878 War (Album de la société ottomane de secours aux blessés militaires, guerre 1877–​1878). Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14). Figure 86. Le Dr Serviçen (detail of Members of the Central Committee of the Red Crescent, 1878).

discourse on Ottoman identity.”31 It is hardly surprising then that the Osmanlı critic should encompass them as exemplars of Ottomanism in his 1880 review. The foreign expatriate artists are also brought within this encompassing Ottoman interpretation of the event, praised as “friends of our country.” The British resident artist, Mary Adelaide Walker, was singled out in particular for rendering “a great service” to the Ottoman Empire as an art teacher to the Ottoman-Armenian Verjin Serviçen.32 In signaling the pedagogical value of women’s networks, this critic underscores collaborations traversing national boundaries that had been in operation in Istanbul for several decades prior to the exhibition he was reviewing. By the 1880s Walker was well established as one of the city’s key art teachers offering public lectures on drawing as well as ladies’ drawing classes and publicly exhibiting her work in her studio in Pera on Rue Terjiman.33 She had been employed between 1870 and 1872 as the drawing and watercolor teacher at the Women’s Teacher Training College of Istanbul.34 This school established in 1870 was another important Ottoman state education reform initiative. These informal Istanbul women’s art networks were also evident in the international arena when the work of both Walker and her pupil Serviçen was exhibited together, among a select group of Ottoman painters and photographers, at the Ottoman pavilion of the 1867 International exposition in Paris.35 Serviçen exhibited a painting entitled Circassian Girl Serving Coffee while Mary Walker exhibited a portrait of Sultan Abdülaziz, an extremely prestigious commission because the sultan himself attended this exhibition in Paris.36 The fact that Walker was entrusted with such a distinguished commission is indicative of the respect with which she was held in the Ottoman capital among members of the imperial family, despite being an artist with no professional prestige in Europe. This advantageous connection for Walker was initiated by the women of the Ottoman royal family, whose harem portraits she had painted soon after her arrival in Istanbul in the 1850s. Sultan Abdülmecid’s daughter, Fatma Sultan, was one of Walker’s most powerful female patrons.37 Mary Adelaide Walker and Verjin Serviçen are by no means an isolated case of women’s pedagogic networks at the Istanbul exhibitions. The inclusion of four still-life paintings by Mustafa Fazıl Paşa’s daughter Princess Nazlı Hanım points to further informal cross-cultural social ties. While Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting in this same exhibition, Two Musician Girls, 1880 (fig. 87), celebrates young women’s accomplishment in the traditional arts of music, Nazlı’s own contribution is evidence of a nascent interest in the practice of painting among elite Ottoman women. One of the early inspirations for her interest in art was the Danish-Polish painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, who had been commissioned to paint the young princess’s portrait in 1870. Jerichau-Baumann had also been an art tutor for Nazlı’s uncle, the Ottoman-Egyptian Prince Halim Paşa, and his wife and had exhibited two portraits in Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s Istanbul exhibition in 1875.38 Revealing a distinct preference for biography over art, the review published in D ­ enmark

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Figure 87. Osman Hamdi, Two Musician Girls, 1880. Oil on canvas, 58 × 39 cm. Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, Orientalist Painting Collection, Istanbul.

that same year passed over the cross-cultural connections of the 1880 Istanbul exhibition, instead reducing it to an Orientalist stereotype of Turkish despotism. The report in Dagbladet focused on the personal lives of the two Muslim painters, Osman Hamdi Bey and Princess Nazlı. The reviewer was particularly fixated on rumors about Princess Nazlı Hanım and her famous husband Halil Şerif Paşa, the renowned art collector and Ottoman statesman, whose notoriety in Europe was summed up in a reference to his “[squandering] an enormous fortune during the wildest of escapades.” Any serious consideration of Ottoman art practice or patronage was sidelined in favor of a rumor of Nazlı’s virtual imprisonment by her so-called “unworthy husband.”39 Back in Istanbul in 1880, in his review of the ABC club exhibition, the Osmanlı reviewer by contrast cited a more elevated European response to his own art criticism. Specifically Abdullah Kâmil noted that his article published some months earlier of Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting, Türbe of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed, which had been exhibited at the French Embassy in Tarabya and again in the Abdullah Frères studio in Pera, had inspired the Austrian Art Museum to contact the artist to purchase the work.40 This painting was one of a number of Bursa’s Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) that Osman Hamdi Bey produced in the 1880s, including a work by the same title shown at the ABC club exhibition of 1881.41 This work is likely to be the painting Prayer in the Green Tomb, 1881 (fig. 88). It was a theme that he revisited and reconfigured in the decades ahead, representing both men and women within the Yeşil Türbe.42 Abdullah Kâmil’s extended response to the painting exhibited in the Abdullah Frères photographic studio in 1880 offers a valuable insight into the reception of Osman Hamdi Bey’s art in Istanbul. It reveals the contemporary political resonances of his Bursa religious paintings in this decade and clearly allies the ideology of Ottomanism with a particular aesthetic response to the work. Abdullah Kâmil praised Sultan Mehmed I (r. 1413–​21) as a man who was “more illustrious than all our other illustrious Sovereigns [and who] succeeded in rebuilding the State from its ruins, despite the complicated plots and intrigues which surrounded him on all sides . . . he reunited the Ottoman Empire in its entirety under his powerful rule and thus provided the precedent for the glorious victories of his successors by giving them back the way to Constantinople.”43 Stressing the contemporary political import of this painting and the patriotism of the artist himself, the reviewer asserts that “in taking as a theme for his works of art the celebration of such men, a painter like Hamdy Bey, emulating the glorious Sovereign he thus recalls to our filial memory, adds to his merit as an artist another and even more praiseworthy merit: that of the true patriot.” This critic articulates with great clarity what a number of scholars have identified as Osman Hamdi Bey’s historical genre painting, where the “reality effect” of Orientalist painting is redeployed to represent Ottoman cultural history.44 Osman Hamdi Bey’s choice of the Yeşil Türbe in Bursa was particularly resonant in the context of a revivalist Ottoman discourse where the restoration of the OttomanIslamic heritage of the former capital was linked to emergent notions of Ottoman cultural patrimony.45

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Figure 88. Osman Hamdi, Prayer in the Green Tomb, 1881. Oil on canvas, 61 × 50.8 cm. © Christie’s Images Limited (1995).

This critic’s extensive visual analysis, however, also reveals a distinctive engagement with the language of academic art that inspired an affective response in the viewer that one might call a devotional effect. The critic responds to the pared-down space of the türbe, the “noble simplicity” of the composition, “the generally pure and gentle tone that reigns within,” the “complete truth of all its detail” as well as their “simple and

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Figure 89. John Frederick Lewis, The Commentator on the Koran: Interior of a Royal Tomb, Bursa, Asia Minor, 1869. Oil on wood, 62.5 × 75.5 cm. Elton Hall Collection.

conscientious execution.” “Taken together,” he asserts, “all these impressive qualities produce upon the soul of the viewer exactly the same profound and grave emotion it would experience, and the artist himself truly experienced, in contemplating the actual objects, the sacred place, and the moving scene that are the subject of his work.”46 The critic responds to the austere simplicity of Osman Hamdi’s religious painting. This is not the sensuous pleasure in details that we associate, for example, with the Orientalist aestheticism of John Frederick Lewis’s art and which we see in his 1869 painting of the Bursa Yeşil Türbe (fig. 89), where the eye is diverted by the anecdotal details of exquisite flowers and the superbly rendered carpet on which the religious man is seated. The way the details operate in Osman Hamdi Bey’s religious paintings also differs from the sensuous pleasures evident in his own images of women from these years, such as the one modeled on his wife Naile that he exhibited at the Istanbul exhibition of 1881 (fig. 90).47 All the details in the türbe painting focus on the act of devotion, a devotion that the Ottoman critic articulates as encompassing both a political and religious dimension.48 He writes:

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Figure 90. Osman Hamdi, Young Girl Placing a Vase, 1881. Oil on canvas, 55 × 37 cm. Feryal and Kemal Gülman Collection.

How could this emotion not communicate itself to every truly Ottoman heart with the same force as felt by the patriotic artist himself, for whom this ancient splendor, with its shawls, carpets, enamels, bronzes, book bindings, embroideries, and its stained glass—​ all these wonders of art and industry brought together by Sultan Mohammed Chelebi in his own turbé, his greatest and final work, are not magical objects of art and curiosities to make all the amateurs crazy; but rather they are august witnesses of our beginnings, of the glory of our ancestors, which invite us to remember their great history so that we might be like them.49

Through the invocation to venerate one of the Ottoman Empire’s great forebears, Abdullah Kâmil’s interpretation of Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting articulates a clear sense of

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belonging via a shared devotion to cultural and political heritage. This is an invocation of the Ottoman past as a model for the future. How then did foreign resident painters who participated in the Istanbul exhibitions articulate their relationship to the culture in which some of them had lived for over thirty years? In contrast to Osman Hamdi Bey’s historical genre paintings, many of the works by the British artists were picturesque Istanbul landscapes, views of Büyükada, the Galata Kulesi, and familiar sites along the Bosporus. Although most of these paintings are untraced, several of these artists published Istanbul landscapes in their memoirs and accounts of the city. Edwin Pears, for example, published his watercolor Constantinople from the Bosporus (fig. 91) in his memoir Forty Years in Constantinople of 1916, and a number of the same Istanbul sites that James Robertson represented in his hand-painted photographs exhibited in 1881 had earlier been published as prints in the English translation of Théophile Gautier’s travelogue Constantinople of Today (fig. 92) and, as Bahattin Öztuncay notes, in the Illustrated London News.50 So too, Mary Adelaide Walker published her sketches of Istanbul in her 1897 travelogue Old Tracks and New Landmarks. Through the unique conjunction of text and image in Walker’s volume, rather than an invocation of belonging via cultural patrimony, Walker articulated an aesthetics of attachment to the cosmopolitan capital that I would term the resident picturesque. This provides one way of thinking about the particular significance for British expatriates of this cluster of Istanbul landscapes at the 1880s exhibitions. Walker’s choice of pronoun in the title for her chapter on Istanbul, “Our Beautiful Waterway: Bosphorus Vignettes,” is both plural and possessive, signaling the writer’s identification with, and claim upon, the city. In nineteenth-century Istanbul this is an expatriate’s provisional identification based on long-term residence within a foreign sovereign state, not underpinned by the territorial claims of imperialism. At the outset Walker distinguishes between her own subject-position and that of the casual tourist. She contrasts her intimate knowledge of the city with their fleeting, often erroneous impressions, but above all she is repelled by their failure to anticipate the cosmopolitan sophistication of the city in which they have arrived. For Walker this is signaled through their sartorial miscalculation: “they climb the steep ascent to Pera, displaying with delightful unconcern the most impossible costumes, well suited, perhaps, to tent life and the ruins of Baalbec, but of startling eccentricity in the very modern and up-to-date High Street of our suburb.”51 This was the district where Walker lived, where her studio was located as well as the church in which her brother was the appointed chaplain. The distinction that Walker invokes between tourist and travel writer is a familiar rhetorical device of the genre through which the author establishes her authority, and yet what is particularly interesting in Walker’s text is that she aligns her critique with different ways of viewing Istanbul. What she disparages most in these frivolous visitors is that they look but do not see, and she counterpoints their blindness with her own insights. According to Walker, their desire for a singular vantage point from which to overview the city produces a superficial stereotypical European view that generalizes,

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Figure 91. Edwin Pears, Constantinople from the Bosporus: From One of My Water-colour Sketches. From Forty Years in Constantinople: The Recollections of Sir Edwin Pears, 1873–​1915 (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916), illustration facing page 6. Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections, Fisher Library, University of Sydney. Figure 92. James Robertson, Castle of Asia on the Bosphorus. From Théophile Gautier, Constantinople of Today (London: David Bogue, 1854), illustration facing page 355. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, DR721.G275.

Figure 93. Mary Adelaide Walker, Roumeli Hissar. From Mary Adelaide Walker, Old Tracks and New Landmarks: Wayside Sketches in Crete, Macedonia, Mitylene, etc. (London: Richard Bentley, 1897), illustration facing page 356. Courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections, Fisher Library, University of Sydney (915.6.42).

exoticizes, and bifurcates Istanbul. Instead she proposes an alternative mode of viewing, one that was familiar to any resident who traveled in the boats that regularly traversed the Bosporus. She characterizes this mode as a “moving panorama.” Walker writes: “To appreciate the beauties of this celebrated waterway, they should be taken in detail, and are best seen, if possible, from a caïque, or steam-launch, or from the cabin of a steamer, almost on a level with the water, where, through the little windows on the shore side, you obtain a moving panorama of exquisite vignettes.”52 Through the descriptive flow of her chapter’s narrative, Walker provides for us a “moving panorama” of detailed and precise readings of the city. The accompanying sketch, titled Roumeli Hissar (fig. 93), delivers that water vantage point, framed as if from a larger ship looking down onto smaller watercraft in the foreground, across to the edge of the shore, and up to the landmark fortress towers. Her text illuminates the range of architectural details that are seen here, emphasizing that “to the old inhabitant, [this view] offers more startling contrasts, more clear evidence of change, than any spot on these historic shores.”53 Here Walker’s text provides a great deal more specificity about place than is readily discernable in her accompanying illustration. The sketch contrasts the “modernity” of the Americanfunded Robert College with the historic fortress that was crucial to the Ottoman conquest of the city. However, her text presents a more complex view, including among her observations about the modernity of this site the yalı (waterside mansion) of the

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revered former Ottoman statesman and reformer Ahmed Vefik Paşa. Walker conveys her fond personal reminiscences of his “incorruptible integrity, his great learning, and his splendid library.”54 And yet Walker’s textual and visual “tour” concludes in an elegiac tone that blends millennialism with what was by this point a familiar British vision of the inevitability of the Ottoman Empire’s demise, through failures in leadership. Forecasting a bleak future, she characterizes it as “this fair land of ‘lost opportunities.’ ”55 In Walker’s vignettes, Istanbul is not represented as the timeless Orient, but rather as a city marked by contrasts between historic sites, traditional practices, and modernization. The historic beauties of the city and its surroundings are suffused with the here and now of the modernity of a cosmopolitan city.56 The picturesque and the fragmentary aesthetics of the vignette become a way of sustaining these disjunctions without contradiction.57 Walker privileges the British and American contribution to this modernization but the avatars of progress in her text are not only European. She plays to Orientalist notions of the city’s exoticism, through tales of palace life and “the insensate luxury of the East,” but these moments of objectification are contrasted with a more sympathetic view premised upon the bonds of friendship with individual men and women of the Ottoman elite.58 These contradictions between intimacy and distance disclose the conflicted sense of belonging of the foreign expatriate, who describes herself as an “old inhabitant” of the city but is nonetheless a foreigner. Between Walker’s notion of the resident picturesque and Abdullah Kâmil’s interpretation of Osman Hamdi Bey’s historical genre painting, we see two very different definitions of belonging. Both are premised on personalizing a connection to place but with very different implications for the future. Walker’s dwells on the failures of leadership and reform, whereas for Abdullah Kâmil the glorious Ottoman past with its exemplar of great leadership provides a model for the future. So far I have focused on the competing claims of two groups in these exhibitions. The British resident painters and critics claimed a commonality between the artists of different nationalities on the basis of a shared affinity with the city, and distinguished their notion of the resident picturesque from the superficial insights of the British tourist. This concept of artistic community based on an affinity among separate national entities in Istanbul was clearly incompatible with prevailing concepts of empire for the Ottoman critic, for whom this categorization too closely reflected the divisive foreign policy of the European powers that threatened the integrity of the Ottoman Empire in the political domain. Instead this critic reconfigured the 1880 exhibition as an exemplar of Ottomanism and embraced those Ottoman, Ottoman-Armenian, and resident foreigners whose work was compatible with this supranational ideal. Extending this approach into the realm of aesthetic interpretation, the same critic had earlier argued that Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting of the Yeşil Türbe in Bursa invoked an absorptive experience for the spectator that fused religious devotion with patriotism. My emphasis within this chapter on interpreting these exhibitions through the lens of the Ottoman critic’s response in 1880 is not to read it as an “Ottoman” rather than an “Oriental-

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ist” event. Doing so would erroneously transform the relatively inchoate form of these amateur collaborations into an ideological program. Instead my aim here is to map the multiple intersecting networks that were involved in these events and the range of alliances that emerged. These networks informed the critical standoff that surfaced in 1880, but the events themselves reveal the range of alliances that cut across any neat separations along national boundaries. Yet another network and divergent interpretation of the exhibitions is evident in the Armenian critic’s review of the ABC club’s exhibition of 1882. Written for an Armenian readership, this article was first published in the Istanbul newspaper, Masis, and later reprinted in Ardzagank in Tiflis (Tbilisi). The journalist approaches this event with the express intention of gauging the “position Armenian art has attained” and he exclusively addresses the work of these artists.59 With great pride the review leads off with praise for the work of Yervant Osgan, “our greatest sculptor.” Here the possessive pronoun is addressed to the educated Armenian community who comprised the readership for the two publications, and the review is evidence of both papers’ support for an efflorescence of the arts that has subsequently been characterized as an Armenian cultural awakening.60 This is a different collectivity from that within which Yervant Osgan had been incorporated by Abdullah Kâmil in his multiethnic Ottomanist sentiments in 1880. Intracommunity identity, although factional, was strong within the Armenian millet in Istanbul and across the region.61 For the Armenian elites in Istanbul in particular this community identity had long been compatible with the broader designation of Ottoman imperial identity, especially for Istanbul’s amira class.62 However, the compatibility of the Istanbul Armenian millet’s identity within an Ottoman imperial definition of a multiethnic, multireligious state came under increasing strain in this period. The political context differed in the cosmopolitan Georgian city of Tiflis within the Russia Empire in the Caucasus; it was a key generative site for the Armenian cultural revival and nationalist sentiment outside the Ottoman Empire.63 Thus this review written in Istanbul and republished in Tiflis is an intriguing example of the interpretation of these Istanbul exhibitions within international Armenian networks. In the second half of the nineteenth century many of Istanbul’s Armenian artists worked for diverse patrons and audiences. The same artists employed by the Ottoman state created art for Istanbul’s Armenian churches and patrons among the prosperous members of their community.64 For many among this generation their cultural references were strongly Western European, with ties to Istanbul’s foreign diplomatic communities who were also clients for their art. The Istanbul exhibitions created opportunities to attract new patrons and forge new alliances. Yervant Osgan Efendi, for example, met Osman Hamdi Bey at the 1881 exhibition and they worked together at the Art School founded in 1882.65 The two men also collaborated on the Ottoman Imperial Museum’s archaeological expedition to Nemrud Dağı in southeastern Anatolia for which they published a co-authored survey report in 1883.66 The polyvalence of Armenian practice in this period is evident in the diversity of

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their work at the Istanbul exhibitions. Mgrdich (Mıgırdiç) Givanian’s contribution exemplifies both the local and international references often seen in the work of the Armenians. In 1882 he exhibited a nightscape of Istanbul dramatically illuminated by fire (an all too familiar experience for residents of the capital) alongside a copy of the British artist Charles Eastlake’s painting Byron’s Dream of 1827 (fig. 94). The British Romantic poet reclines in the foreground amidst an idyllic landscape on the Gulf of Corinth with Mount Parnassus and Helicon in the background. This is a visual evocation of the poet in the place that inspired his poem “The Dream” and which is so eloquently rendered in its fourth stanza.67 Givanian translates the composition into moody deep blue hues rather than Eastlake’s sunny Claudian palette, in all likelihood because the Armenian painter worked from the popular and widely circulated engraving by Willmore (fig. 95) that rendered the painting into somber black and white tones.68 This painting is similar to many of his Istanbul landscapes that were as strongly influenced by the Romantic aesthetics of Russian-Armenian artist Ivan (Hovhannes) Aivazovsky as by Western European art (fig. 96). Givanian probably hoped to attract a British buyer at this exhibition so well attended by the diplomatic communities. The persona of the heroic British Romantic poet, who had been very committed to Armenian language and culture, resonated strongly within the Armenian literary community, so this painting would also have appealed to an educated Armenian audience.69 The diverse cultural references within the art produced by the Armenians at the Istanbul exhibitions are evidence of the heterogeneity of their influences and clients. Yet in the Masis / Ardzagank review, focused exclusively on assessing the achievements of artists from this community, they are all claimed as an expression of Armenian cultural identity. For many of Istanbul’s Armenian elites this identity was still seen to be compatible with Ottoman political governance, but in the 1870s and ’80s there emerged fissures in the relationship between the state and the Ottoman Armenians. This even had an impact on some of the Armenians working for the Ottoman court.70 The state became increasingly concerned about foreign support for the emerging protonationalist ideals, especially among the Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia where the empire was under threat from Russian imperial ambitions. The situation of uneasy accommodation among Istanbul’s Armenians was to change dramatically with the violent events that unfolded in Eastern Anatolia that would impact on the Ottoman capital in the next decade.71 The politically sensitive situation in Eastern Anatolia is broached in the reviewer’s closing remarks about Bedros Srabian’s painting of an Armenian beggar from Van (fig. 97) (now held in the National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan). The empire’s diverse lower classes were often represented at the Istanbul exhibitions with Ottomans and expatriates submitting paintings of Zeybeks, Jewish antique merchants, and various members of Istanbul’s esnafs (guilds) in traditional costume engaged in various crafts or commercial activities. Such images evidently appealed to both a European-Orientalist ethnographic sensibility and an elite Ottoman interest in the empire’s diverse population.72 Although

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Figure 94. Mgrdich Givanian, Byron’s Dream, n.d. Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Photographer: Jenni Carter. Figure 95. James T. Willmore, after Charles Eastlake, Byron’s Dream, 1833. Line engraving, 54.5 × 68.6 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1979.34.7.

Figure 96. Ivan Aivazovsky, Sarayburnu, 1874. Oil on canvas, 31 × 40 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1272.

Srabian’s painting of an anonymous beggar is in the same ethnographic vein as these works, it is remarkable for the immediacy of its address to the viewer that breaches the implied distance between the viewer and the object of an ethnographic representation. This man patiently implores the spectator with a quiet, resolute stare. His right hand grips a walking stick with a force that underscores the determined duration of his address to the viewer. The resources of the realist figure painter are deployed to compelling effect in this work. The landscape of veins on his aged hands and his deeply etched brow underscore his visceral humanity, inviting an empathic response. The Armenian reviewer proffered a political interpretation of the work: “The painter’s brush has succeeded in personifying the wanderings and dispossession of our provincial brothers. I saw foreigners who became sad before this state of affairs and wasn’t it natural that I should weep —​I who am not a connoisseur of the arts but simply a PATRIOT.”73 For this writer the painting was compelling because it drew attention to the plight of the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia under current Ottoman government policies. The reference to foreign sympathy reinforced these political resonances. Foreign, particularly British, support for the Armenian populations in Eastern Anatolia had been used as political leverage over the Ottoman state, which made this a highly sensitive issue for the Ottoman government.

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Figure 97. Bedros Srabian, An Armenian Beggar from Van, 1882. Oil on canvas, 94 × 71 cm. National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan.

This interpretation of the painting as a critique of the Ottoman state could not have been self-evident to the Ottoman police censors or no doubt they would have ordered its removal when two other works were taken down from the 1882 exhibition. The reviewer for the Constantinople Messenger also made no comment about the subject of Srabian’s painting. Confining his remarks to aesthetic matters by suggesting improvements that the artist could make in his use of colors and by softening the outlines, this critic observed that “the power of expression and projection displayed in [Srabian’s] works induces me to believe he might become a great artist.”74 The fact that the authorities did not censor Srabian’s painting suggests that they saw the work as a benign ethnographic representation. The 1882 exhibition was the first of these events to fall foul of Sultan Abdülhamid’s censors. Both the Armenian newspaper and the Constantinople Messenger noted that the police had removed two works from public view. According to the latter paper’s brief and

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somewhat cryptic account of this intervention, the unnamed works were mistakenly thought to allude to sensitive political events in the region. The Constantinople Messenger wrote: [The exhibition has been] favoured with a visit from the police, whose vigilant eye was fain to discern in a sporting sketch and in another picture of somewhat imaginative design, a significance which did not reveal itself to ordinary observation, and which to the artists themselves placed their works in a new light. These two pictures have accordingly been removed from the line. It may be remarked that the lion is the emblem of England, and not of any Oriental State, and that the vultures would probably have been portraits of Mr. Bradlaugh, Cetewayo, Mr. Parnell &c., if the picture had not been painted long before any of these actors appeared upon the scene.75

It seems likely that Abdülhamid’s censors considered the allegory a reference to events unfolding in Egypt, where the Ottoman Empire’s nominal sovereignty of its North African province was threatened by British pressures to respond to the nationalist uprising in Egypt led by Aḥmad ʻUrābī Pasha. This was the most urgent threat to the empire’s territorial integrity in 1882, and matters in Egypt were on a knife’s edge at the time of this exhibition. Sultan Abdülhamid was endeavoring to negotiate a political solution in order to avoid British military intervention. On July 13, a month and a half after this review was published, the British disregarded the sultan’s efforts and forced the matter by bombarding Alexandria.76 But the critic for the Constantinople Messenger construed this as a misinterpretation of the work of art on display in Pera in 1882, having been painted well before this contemporary political crisis. In any case the lion, he asserted, was an allegorical representation of Britain, not “any Oriental State.” If it were to be related to political events, he adduced it was more pertinent to recent attacks on British sovereignty in South Africa and Ireland, referencing the leader of the Zulu wars, former King Cetewayo, and the staunch advocates of pro-Irish home rule, Charles Parnell and Charles Bradlaugh. All three had been regularly cited in the British press and were the focus of satirical cartoons in Punch in whose pages Britain was consistently rendered as the noble lion and the Ottomans derisively caricatured as the sly fox.77 Whatever the intended meaning of this confiscated painting, the controversy indicates the political tensions that could be provoked by differing interpretations of the visual arts among the diverse audiences for art in the Ottoman capital. The particular significance of these Istanbul exhibitions is underscored by situating them within the broader context of nineteenth-century exhibition culture. On the one hand, the contribution of a range of Ottoman artists and the contemporary critical response distinguishes them from European societies of Orientalist painting such as the one in France that Roger Benjamin has characterized as “a collectivity authoring Orientalism.” 78 On the other hand, because these Istanbul exhibitions were loosely structured events that encompassed such a diverse range of agendas, including those

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of the resident expatriates and international Armenian networks, they are also to be distinguished from the official Ottoman displays at the European international exhibitions and Istanbul’s contemporaneous state-sponsored museums. Zeynep Çelik and Wendy Shaw among others have analyzed Ottoman museology and Ottoman pavilions at the international exhibitions as the empire’s negotiated response to modernization and European imperialism.79 Although the Istanbul art exhibitions intersected with these contemporary Ottoman debates about the empire’s past as a resource to understand the contemporary context and to imagine its future, these events did not have the univocal or programmatic agenda of the state-sponsored Ottoman pavilions. Instead, they were a concatenation of diverse participants and allegiances and were greeted by a range of reviews attributing divergent meanings to the collective endeavor. Analyzing these Istanbul exhibitions challenges us to expand the canon of Orientalism by bringing into focus not just the professional artists whose Orientalist paintings were produced for audiences in Europe, but the amateur painters of Istanbul. These resident foreign artists were exhibiting their work to a more diverse audience, encompassing European expatriates and Istanbul’s Ottoman elites. Drawing them into the analysis reveals a more sustained connection between European Orientalism and the initiatives of the Ottoman elites to develop art in the public sphere. So too, a study of these exhibitions highlights the limitations of the very project of studying Orientalism or Ottoman painting as bounded by national traditions because they bring into sharp focus how cross-cultural and international art networks operated within the cosmopolitan capital in this period. A study of their fraught critical reception reveals some of the varied ways such collaborations were imagined, interpreted, and contested. The reviews and reports of these events published in Istanbul, London, Copenhagen, and Tiflis are the remnant gossamer threads that disclose intersecting networks within diverse Istanbul communities and the links between these communities and the art world across Western Europe and the Caucasus. At times these networks are divided along the fault lines of national allegiance in response to contemporary political debates, but a study of these exhibitions also discloses the sense of multiple belonging of many of Istanbul’s artists (especially for those who were members of Ottoman minority communities). Above all a study of these little-known exhibitions provides insights into the multiplexity of intersecting network structures that proceeded and emerged out of these events.80

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5 SELF-PORTRAITURE IN OTTOMAN ISTANBUL Once back in Constantinople I can speak to you face to face and will put before you all my plans, which I am sure you will endorse. For the moment, my dear father, I will say only that I am leaving Paris with the strong intention of coming back here by whatever means possible, not that life here seems to me to be better than over there, but because there is very definitely something that binds me to this place: as I have said more than once, I absolutely do not wish to give up painting, whatever the cost to me. Painting cannot be learnt from books, it is necessary to see the way it is done, it is necessary to see the old masters and the moderns, and in Constantinople I will have none of that. I am making good progress, already I am known in the artistic world, my paintings are spoken of. The painting I did this year has been reproduced in the journal L’Autographe without my intervening in any way to make this happen. You will quite understand why, in these circumstances, I will not leave Paris. OSMAN HAMDY BEY, JUNE 26, 1868

This letter written by the young Osman Hamdi Bey to his father expresses a passionate conviction that his intention to establish an artistic career necessitates a life in Paris. He cannot see how his fledgling aspirations could be sustained if he succumbs to his father’s alternate future plans for him in the Ottoman capital without the art collections and other infrastructure for his chosen craft. In hindsight this letter is poignant because Osman Hamdi did indeed return to Istanbul and spent the majority of his professional life working in the city as a bureaucrat and arts administrator. Yet despite these early bleak predictions that he could not sustain his art outside the French cultural capital, Istanbul proved an extremely enabling context for Osman Hamdi. These were the reflections of a young man who was to become a major figure in the Istanbul art world, a key player in international archaeological networks, and who is today revered as a founding figure of modern Turkish painting. Yet this letter from the young man prior to his return to the city is a provocation to further art-historical inquiry. How did Osman Hamdi and his Ottoman and expatriate peers in Istanbul envisage themselves and their artistic practice during this period when they were working to establish regular exhibitions, collections, and institutions for art training in the city? Self-portraits by this generation offer the most intimate insights into how they perceived themselves

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and their practice as modern artists in a period and a location where this cultural category was in formation. The complexity and diversity of the self-portraits produced in this context is striking. Some are declarations of professional identity, some promise to reveal psychological interiority, while others engage the phenomenological conundrum of painting a self-portrait. In this chapter I focus on the self-portraits of three painters working in the city during the long reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II: Fausto Zonaro, Osman Hamdi Bey, and Şeker Ahmed Paşa. Each was a key player in the formation of the art scene in late Ottoman Istanbul and their self-representations are particularly revealing of these aspirations. All three artists trained in Europe and subsequently had careers in the employ of the Ottoman state with close relations to Abdülhamid II’s court. Italian expatriate, long-term Istanbul resident, and court painter to the sultan, Fausto Zonaro took a particularly inventive approach to the genre of self-portraiture as a way of articulating his place as a foreigner within Ottoman culture. The self-portraits by two of the most important artists among the first generation of Paris-trained Ottoman painters, Osman Hamdi Bey and Şeker Ahmed Paşa, are the first self-conscious statements of a modern Ottoman artistic identity. Through self-portraiture each grappled with the ontological challenge of being an easel painter in the Ottoman capital. In distinct ways each of these self-representations is embedded within the defining twin poles of Istanbul’s art world—​palace patronage and the intimate social milieu of the artist’s studio.

C O U R T PA I N T E R

During his tenure as the official artist at the court of Sultan Abdülhamid II, Fausto Zonaro painted a number of intriguing self-portraits. Sociocentric in their focus and variously embedded within Ottoman rituals of statecraft and Islamic religious practices, these representations indicate a complex cross-cultural articulation of the artist’s selfimage premised upon an identification with Ottoman society. Zonaro’s “Ottoman” selfportraits are particularly significant because they resist any reductive characterization of Orientalist artistic identity. Zonaro’s appointment as a painter to the Ottoman court in 1896 signaled a major turning point in his career. Securing this status within the highest level of Ottoman culture led to the recognition of his achievements by the Italian government.1 Zonaro had already lived in Istanbul for five years by the time of his prestigious palace appointment. He was thirty-seven years old when he arrived, a relatively unknown painter in Italy, and it took him several years to find his feet within the city where he was to live for nineteen years. Like so many foreign painters in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, initially Zonaro sold paintings wherever he could; these were financially difficult years.2 Zonaro’s palace appointment alleviated such monetary constraints and facilitated a level of access to the notoriously closed world of Abdülhamid’s court circle within the Yıldız Palace complex that was afforded to few foreign nationals.3

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Figure 98. Fausto Zonaro, Ertuğrul Cavalry Regiment Crossing the Galata Bridge, 1901. Oil on canvas, 121 × 203 cm. © National Palaces, Istanbul, Inv. No. 11 / 1172.

Zonaro’s painting of the Ertuğrul cavalry regiment (fig. 98) secured his court appointment, one of many paintings commissioned for the palace that celebrated the public ceremonies that were such a feature of Sultan Abdühamid’s reign. As Selim Deringil argues, these ceremonies were a means through which “the symbolic language of the sultanate and caliphate [were promoted] in a world context where pomp and circumstance had become a form of competition between states.”4 In this painting, the power of the Ottoman state is symbolized through a celebration of the figure of its absent leader. The sultan is represented by his personal bodyguards, an elite troop named after the father of Osman, the dynasty’s founder.5 White horses also reference the origins of this dynastic tradition, while the Western-derived uniforms signal the modernity of the sultan’s elite guard. This is characteristic of Abdülhamid’s clever manipulation of state symbolism, which combined tradition and modernity in a celebration of the sultan as head of a noble lineage. One can see why Zonaro’s painting appealed to the sultan, with its impressive spectacle of the troop’s procession across the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, a spectacle of empire admired by the crowd of Ottomans and foreigners on the left. More than any of his reformist predecessors, Abdülhamid fused his modernizing program with the promotion of pan-Islamism, through symbolic emphasis on the sultan’s role as caliph, the leader of Islam. The procession to the Friday prayer, the selamlık, was the most important of these ceremonial events; it was a rare moment when the reclusive sultan could be seen in public. By the late nineteenth century, the selamlık

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Figure 99. Elisa Pante Zonaro, The Friday Parade, n.d. Albumen print. Courtesy of the Zonaro Family, Florence, Italy. Figure 100. Detail of fig. 99, showing Fausto Zonaro walking behind Sultan Abdülhamid II’s carriage.

had become a tourist attraction, and Abdülhamid was well aware of its strategic value in promoting his role as statesman and religious leader to both Ottomans and foreign visitors. The procession was hierarchically ordered around the sultan; his male relatives were followed by the palace retinue, and then came leading Ottoman bureaucrats and high-ranking members of the military. The photograph of the selamlık ceremony taken by Zonaro’s wife, Elisa, shows the parade sweeping down the street from the sultan’s palace toward the mosque (fig. 99); Zonaro is himself included here (fig. 100). He occupies neither the peripheral position of the foreign tourists with their distanced vantage point from the top of the hill, nor the designated position of esteemed visiting foreign dignitaries, who were provided with a dais from which to watch the parade. Instead, he is walking within the parade itself, behind the sultan’s carriage, indicative of his status as a member of Abdülhamid’s palace retinue. Abdülhamid was particularly adept at using strategies of inclusion for Ottomans and select foreigners within his court. This was extended beyond the parameters of the court’s inner circle through the award of decorations and medals, which became, as Deringil has argued, “personal manifestations of imperial munificence,” an intimate “manifestation of the integrative symbolic code” that promoted the inclusion of those chosen within the sultan’s empire.6 Zonaro’s self-portrait articulates this sense of inclusion (fig. 101). He has chosen to represent himself in his court dress of suit and fez, proudly displaying the raft of medals that were bestowed by the sultan.7 With its bustlength format and frontal pose this is a public presentation in which the artist depicts himself as he wanted others to see him—​in his prestigious social role as painter to the sultan. It is a declaration akin to that written on his business card in Italian and Ottoman, “Pittore di S. M. il Sultano.” Zonaro’s painting of the Rıfaî dervishes (fig. 102) is a more unusual embedded self-portrait, but is similarly inclusive in terms of his placement within the Ottoman religious ritual that is depicted. Zonaro paints himself in a trance state, as one among the row of worshippers absorbed in the kıyam zikri (the standing zikri) on the left (fig. 103).8 He is part of a dervish ceremony within the intimate setting of the ceremonial room, the tevhidhane, within the Rıfaî Âsitanesi in Scutari (Üsküdar).9 This was one of the few Islamic religious ceremonies to which non-Muslims were welcomed. Access to the city’s mosques was much more strictly regulated. This was one of two of the most well-known lodges in the city, because they welcomed visitors; the other was the Galata Mevlevîhanesi, the grand lodge of the Mevlevis (known to Europeans as the whirling dervishes). Accounts of these two dervish Âsitanes appeared in all the major travel guides, informing visitors about their ritual practices and the times of the ceremonies. The Rıfaî dervishes (known to Europeans as the howling dervishes) were particularly intriguing to travelers earlier in the century because of their self-harming rituals. Attitudes in these guides vacillate between fascination with the exoticism of the spectacle, distaste for its barbarism, and skepticism about its authenticity.10 By mid-century, these self-

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Figure 101. Fausto Zonaro, Self-Portrait, 1901. Oil on canvas, 75 × 60 cm. Courtesy of Comune di Masi Collection, Padua.

harming rituals were no longer being performed, but their ceremonies still attracted foreign visitors. In Théophile Gautier’s account of the Rıfaî rituals, we encounter a more sympathetic response. Gautier’s evocative description of the kıyam zikri closely parallels the immersive experience evoked in Zonaro’s painting: “The whole band animated as it were by one feeling, retired one step simultaneously, and then threw themselves forward with an equally simultaneous plunge. . . . Little by little the inspiration comes . . . the whole line falls back at once before some invisible gust, like reeds before a tempest, and then rises again as suddenly; and always, at each forward plunge, the terrible ‘Allah-hou!’ bursts forth with increasing fury!” This combination of rhythmic movement and cries, which Gautier compares to Gregorian chant, is calculated, he asserts, “to produce a sympathetic giddiness in the spectators.” It occasionally inspired Muslims in the audience to join the chanting dervishes.11

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Figure 102. Fausto Zonaro, Dervishes, 1910. Oil on canvas, 100 × 201.3 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library. Figure 103. Detail of fig. 102, showing the artist’s self-portrait. Figure 104. Detail of fig. 102, showing a portrait of Elisa Pante Zonaro.

Like Gautier’s description, Zonaro’s worshippers seem animated as if by one feeling. The bodies of the men in the line on the left arc like a wave, reaching forward in unison, poised in their rhythmic undulation. Similarly, a curve is formed from the bodies in the center of the devsiye ritual that are descending from bending to prone position. In both groups, the synergy of the bodies is underscored by the rhythm of hands. Eyes closed, their bodies emphasize a compelling physical energy. This absorption is observed by the rows of viewers in the background, with the European visitors clearly distinguished by their bonnets and hats. Our eye is particularly drawn to one slightly to the left of center in a blue hat, a portrait of Zonaro’s wife, Elisa, staring intently through her lorgnette (fig. 104). This instrument for facilitating sharper vision provides a marked contrast to the blind absorption of her husband. The contrast between Zonaro and the ladies at the perimeter of the ceremony defines differing degrees of intimacy with the dervish ritual. There are parallels between their relative positioning in this painting and Elisa’s role

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as photographer documenting Zonaro’s inclusion within Sultan Abdülhamid’s selamlık procession. In both images, Elisa’s distance from the events is a measure of Zonaro’s relative intimacy, and she functions as a witness to his inclusion. The absorptive structure of Zonaro’s painting is underscored by comparison with Albert Aublet’s painting that presents the Rıfaî rituals as exotic spectacle (fig. 105). In the center of this work with his back to the mihrab, the Şeyh, in an ecstatic trance state and supported by his assistant, places his feet on the first of the sick children who are submitting before him. The boy kneeling on the left looks pensively at this activity as if hopeful for a good outcome from the Şeyh’s intervention. The children’s tiny bodies seem vulnerable to his weight, which heightens the spectacle of this arcane ritual. Glistening weapons line the walls—​including Topuzlar (maces) and a Teber (halberd)—​t hey are clustered on the mihrab recess and the wall to the right, as a reminder of the self-harming rituals that made the Rıfaî dervish religious practices a source of fascination for Western Orientalists. No such weaponry is evident in Zonaro’s scene, the Şeyh’s feet are barely visible, and it is adult men who are taking part in the devsiye rather than children. The relative passivity of the participants and observers in Aublet’s event distinguishes this painting from the physical engagement of all the dervishes in Zonaro’s scene. In Aublet’s painting only the healing ritual (the devsiye) is conducted by the Şeyh, whereas Zonaro combines this with the rhythmic motion of the kıyam zikri of the dervishes on the left, thus fully activating the space with the rituals of worship. This physical immersion is augmented by an aural component, with the Neyzen playing the reed flute and the Kasidehan chanting prayers to the prophet on the right side. All these elements in Zonaro’s painting elicit sensorial engagement from the viewer in the worshippers’ experience of ecstatic physical immersion. The viewer’s position within the tevhidhane differs in these two paintings. On the right side of Aublet’s work, a turned wooden balustrade demarcates the space between those involved in the ritual and those watching it. No Western visitors are represented here. Costume, banners, and weaponry are all meticulously painted in a style that emphasizes the exotic colors and textures of the Rıfaî tevhidhane interior. As viewers we are positioned on the side of the hall opposite the mihrab, congruent with the place designated for visitors to the ceremony. Facing the dervishes and watching the ritual from this discrete location, the practice becomes a spectacle. In Zonaro’s painting we are in quite a different position in the room. We can see the entrance door on the right and the mihrab wall is behind us; Zonaro has placed us right in the center of the ceremony in close proximity to the ritual (a position underscored by the fact that we look toward the foreign visitors, rather than being among them). So too there is less distinction between those involved in the ritual in this very crowded scene and the visitors who observe it. All of these elements heighten the immersive effect of this painting. The decision to represent himself among the Rıfaî dervishes may seem strange, given Zonaro’s reliance upon the patronage of the orthodox Sunni Sultan Abdülhamid II. Yet the extensive network of dervish lodges throughout Istanbul was crucial to the

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Figure 105. Goupil et Cie, after Albert Aublet, Ceremony of the Howling Dervishes of Scutari (Cérémonie des derviches hurleurs de Scutari), 1882. Oil on canvas, 111 × 146.3 cm; undated photogravure, 18.3 × 24.4 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14).

social and political life of the city in this period, and Sultan Abdülhamid selectively embraced the brotherhoods when they provided him with an instrument for organizing grassroots support across his empire.12 Given the social significance of the dervish lodges in Istanbul, I would argue that Zonaro’s self-depiction as part of that brotherhood is a fantasy of social inclusion; denoting himself as a cultural initiate rather than a casual visitor or a tourist. The encounter may also have been advantageous for the Rıfaî because of Zonaro’s position as Abdülhamdi’s court painter. In his memoir, Zonaro writes about his numerous visits to the Üsküdar Rıfaî Âsitanesi: [W]hen the sheikh learned that I was the Sultan’s artist, he invited me to stay a while after the ceremony and drink some coffee. It was a very courteous acceptance: when this ascetic mystic spoke, he became a different person; wise and knowledgeable, he was someone who could talk easily and at length on many varied subjects. . . . From that day on . . . I was seen as a future comrade of theirs, in short, as a novice disciple . . . in return for the kindness he had shown, I invited the sheikh to my house in Beşiktaş because I wanted to show him lots of things. He came and it was not difficult to get him to pose for a photograph. That day I started on my composition.13

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Other senior dervishes from the Üsküdar Rıfaî Âsitanesi came to pose for Zonaro in his studio in Akaretler as did one of the Mevlevi music masters (Zonaro bought and was given costumes and musical instruments from them).14 They may have been collaborating with the painter to court favor with the sultan because they were probably aware that many of these paintings were intended for Abdülhamid. In a further twist to this most unusual series of self-representations, Zonaro reprised his earlier dervish painting, embedding it within a studio self-portrait and representing himself absorbed in front of that earlier work (fig. 106). Comparing these two paintings reveals the subtle adjustments that have been made in mapping one self-portrait onto the other. In the studio portrait, the dervish painting is drained of its former coloristic brilliance. The dervishes that had earlier been represented in lively plays of greens and reds are reprised in a more muted palette of browns, whites, and gray-blues, thus establishing a coloristic harmony between the artist and his painting. At the same time, the audience within the Rıfaî Âsitanesi that was such a feature of the earlier painting is minimized, thereby drawing us to contemplate more directly the intensity of the dervishes’ physical absorption in their chant. This intimate engagement is made analogous to the absorption of the artist at work in his studio, a connection that is further enhanced by the spatial continuity of the floorboards in both the artist’s studio and the tevhidhane. In the studio portrait Zonaro has positioned himself in front of the bending worshipper, obscuring him from view. His posture echoes the old worshipper to his right within the painting, and his hand takes the place of the worshipper who is descending to the ground, as if mapped onto it. In the former painting, the full weight of this worshipper’s body is moving forward as his hand is about to take this weight. In the studio portrait, that bodily movement lends an energy to the painter’s hand, as the sweeping energetic brush marks that delineate this dervish’s physical transition seem to become coterminous with the energy of the swirl that the artist’s brush has made on the canvas—​as if the painter is channeling that energy of the worshipper’s trance state. From the perspective of all these synergies, the artist’s hand and head could almost be facing out of his dervish painting rather than moving toward it. The painter’s head, however, is turned, looking away. Yet, in terms of sensory engagement, the artist seems to be not so much looking back as touching forward, as if blindly. Here again, the relationship to the old man to the right whose head parallels the artist’s is suggestive—​he is totally absorbed. The brush marks in this studio painting that register the Rıfaî ritual are much looser than in the earlier work, creating a more dynamic sense of the movement of each of the figures. This effect lends a dreamlike quality to the painting in the studio, as if the space of the tevhidhane is now a projection of the reverie of the painter himself. There is also a strange evanescence from the part of the canvas that his brush almost touches. What does this swirling abstract mark represent? It is illegible as an object within the tevhidhane; if it has any representational relation it is to the palette on the studio floor, a shape that it seems to repeat. I would suggest that this creates an artistic analogy to the dervishes’ meditative absorption.

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Figure 106. Fausto Zonaro, Self-Portrait, 1910. Oil on canvas, 120 × 135 cm. Regione del Veneto, Villa Contarini, Fondazione G. E. Ghirardi.

The spatial relations that position the viewer have also changed. With the first painting, the figure closest to the front of the picture plane on the right, chanting prayers, has his back to us, marking our distance; and the prone figures on the ground foremost to us are physically absorbed and indifferent to our presence. This pictorial structure establishes the spectator’s discreet distance from this ritual. In the later painting, the placement of the artist’s hands forms a connection between the painting and the spectator. His right hand holds the brush, touching inward, while his left hand lifts the ruler that is being steadied with his thumb. This ruler creates a strong diagonal that extends beyond the lower edge of the painting’s frame into our space. A similar physical link is implied by the artist’s head facing out to the left, while his body is angled inward (his right leg has all but disappeared because he is so close to his canvas). The back of the artist and the figure reciting the Koran are now touching. In this work, the artist has become a hinge between the viewer’s space and the absorptive action on the canvas that

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he is painting. His immersion in the act of painting is made analogous to the ecstatic spiritual devotion of the Rıfaî brotherhood. This is an absorptive pictorial structure that also implicates the viewer phenomenologically. Where Zonaro’s earlier embedded self-portrait expresses the desire for cultural inclusion, this studio self-portrait creates a cross-cultural analogy for the creative act itself. The distinctive studio self-portrait was completed in 1910, just prior to Zonaro’s permanent departure from Istanbul. As he had flourished under the patronage of the autocratic Sultan Abdülhamid II, so too he suffered when the sultan’s fortunes turned. After Abdülhamid’s humiliating deposition in 1909, Zonaro had little success courting favor with his successor, Mehmed V, and was dismissed from his palace appointment, prompting his return to Italy.15 The vicissitudes of Zonaro’s career were tied to the fortunes of his major Ottoman patron. His “official” portrait signals the high point of that association, displayed through the bestowed medals. This painting was articulated within late-Ottoman rituals of statecraft, affirming the artist’s status through a demonstration of the munificence of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Zonaro’s embedded self-portrait is similarly expressive of the expatriate artist’s desired cultural inclusion. The reprisal of this dervish painting within his later studio self-portrait extends the strategy by making the act of painting itself analogous to the ecstatic immersion in Sufi religious ritual. Through a variety of strategies, ranging from an affirmation of conferred status to cross-cultural analogy, Zonaro created a series of representations of his artistic identity premised upon an intimacy with and respect for Ottoman culture. The potential implications for a study of Orientalist visual culture of this particular model of the expatriate artist becomes evident through a comparison between Fausto Zonaro’s self-portraits and Edward Said’s interpretation of that paradigmatic Orientalist exponent of immersive cross-cultural experience, Richard Burton. Burton is renowned as the Orientalist adventurer who masqueraded as a Pathan doctor in order to participate in the Hajj in 1853.16 Thomas Seddon’s watercolor portrait of Burton (fig. 107) renders him a shadowy, resolute figure in his pilgrimage attire. For Burton, Eastern clothing was a disguise and his undertaking of the pilgrimage was a deception. Richard Burton’s subject position was particularly significant for Said, because, as a rebel against the constraints of Victorian culture, Burton represented the “struggle between individualism and . . . national identification with Europe (specifically England) as an imperial power in the East.”17 For Said, Burton thus became a paradigmatic Orientalist figure because of the subtle ways in which he fused these two seemingly incompatible positions through an emphasis on mastery over all the complexities of Oriental life. Fausto Zonaro presents another model in his memoir that emphasizes the foreign artist developing expertise through dialogue. Zonaro notes that he made significant changes to the right-hand side of his compositional study for Dervishes to correct errors pointed out by his Ottoman friend, Kami Bey, who warned him against making the same errors that Gérôme had made in one of his paintings: “in which he placed the shoes of those at prayer in front of them! It

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Figure 107. Thomas Seddon, Lieutenant Richard Burton in Arab Dress, 1854. Watercolor on paper, 28.2 × 20 cm. Collection of Andrew McIntosh Patrick, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library.

looks, to us Muslims, like they are praying to their shoes and not to Allah. This is such a ridiculous thing that, when we see such a composition, we are both amused and . . . upset thinking about whether the artist meant to create such an ugly caricature of our religion.”18 As well as correcting these errors, Zonaro had his Ottoman friend execute the calligraphies within this painting to ensure their accuracy; a choice that recognized such inscriptions required a practiced hand and could not be easily imitated by the untrained Western artist. For Zonaro this interaction was both a salutary lesson about the potential for inadvertent errors in European Orientalist painting and a declaration of his authority premised upon local knowledge gleaned from dialogue and long-term experience. Zonaro parallels the insights of the expatriate with the native-born artist

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and distinguishes both from the superficiality of the European Orientalists who made only short visits to the city. Zonaro’s experience in Istanbul not only affected the way he rendered his subject matter, it also profoundly transformed his artistic identity. In contrast to Burton, Zo­naro’s self-image is less stridently characterized by individualism, because his selfportraits are embedded within a sociocentric vision of self; his status is defined variously in relation to a higher Ottoman authority and to a collective Islamic religious ritual in which abjuring the self is the aim. His representations of self are embedded within Ottoman cultural codes and express the expatriate artist’s desire to become part of this Ottoman milieu. Once he had relocated to Italy, Zonaro continued to copy and to exhibit his Istanbul paintings, including his self-portraits, along with new Italian landscape works. Although all ties were severed with Istanbul, he still used the title of artist to the sultan in subsequent exhibition catalogues. His Ottoman paintings were problematic for the Italian public when relations between the Ottoman Empire and Italy were at a flashpoint, but generally they were his best-selling works.19 No doubt they appealed to a Western fascination for the exotic Orient; and yet they also reveal how dependent his identity continued to be on this high point of his career, forged through a connection to Istanbul and service to the Ottoman palace.

G E N T L E M A N PA I N T E R

Unlike Zonaro, who had a sustained preoccupation with self-representation, Şeker Ahmed Paşa painted only one self-portrait (fig. 108). This painting is particularly unusual in the oeuvre of an artist preoccupied with landscape and still-life painting, for whom figurative representation held little interest. Given this, his self-portrait created in the 1880s stands out as a considered manifesto of a new artistic identity.20 In this self-portrait, the painter’s eyes fix on his viewer while his hand drags the brush through the red paint on his palette, as if that hand is undeterred from its task by what holds his gaze. Ahmed Ali appears to be looking at us, but this look and his frontal pose also inscribes a prior moment where he is looking at himself in the mirror preparing to paint. The artist is frozen in this moment, ready to transform paint into mimetic representation. Like a palimpsest, the palette holds the evidence of the earliest workings of that transformative process. Its edges are marked with the orderly remnants of the blobs of paint that sit on the very surface of the canvas, insistent reminders that this mimetic representation is a construction, created from this sticky stuff, oil paint through artistic intervention. The brush drags and spreads the paint across the body of that palette, ensuring that it is loaded with just the right amount for the undisclosed representational task that sits on the painter’s easel. These strokes of paint are moving toward the canvas, a directional gesture reinforced by the conjunction of the artist’s left thumb and the two other brushes laden with paint. Ahmed Ali’s right elbow abuts his

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Figure 108. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Self-Portrait, n.d. Oil on canvas, 116 × 84 cm. M. S. G. S. Ü. Istanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Istanbul, Inv. No. 473 / 918.

canvas. In the top half of the work his direct gaze and his frontal pose assert, without any torsion, the distance of looking, while the lower half evokes the proximity of touch. The color of Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s transformative intervention is the same as his fez, that potent symbol of sartorial modernization in nineteenth-century Ottoman culture since Sultan Mahmud II’s dress reforms of 1828–​29. Indeed, this and his European suit indicate a specific social designation for the artist, as a member of the Ottoman elite. Initially receiving military training, Şeker Ahmed Paşa went on to a very distinguished career as a senior Ottoman bureaucrat working as Yaver (aide-de-camp) at the Ottoman court.21 He was, however, also part of the first generation of Ottoman oil painters trained in the Paris studios of leading French artists of the 1860s, in his case those of Boulanger and Gérôme. Like his French academic mentors, Şeker Ahmed Paşa is self-styled as a gentleman

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Figure 109. Hüseyin Avni Lifij, Self-Portrait, 1908–​9. Oil on canvas, 65 × 46 cm. M. S. G. S. Ü. Istanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Istanbul.

painter. He had very little engagement with the French avant-garde, thus it is hardly surprising that this self-portrait has more in common with his academic lineage. It was the next generation of Ottoman painters such as Avni Lifij (fig. 109) who embraced an image of transgressive bohemianism. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to simply interpret Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s self-portrait as a derivative and conservative emulation of European academic portrait conventions. There is a much more specific Ottoman context in which to interpret this artistic self-construction, and the key to this is the emphasis upon transformation within this painting. The artistic milieu in which Şeker Ahmed Paşa was working in Istanbul was fostered by a small group of elites and supported by the Ottoman palace, but when he painted this self-portrait there was little institutional or broad popular support for exhibition culture. Along with Osman Hamdi Bey, he was at the forefront of initiatives to professionalize

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Figure 110. Abdullah Frères, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1894. Albumen print, 27 × 21 cm. Ömer M. Koç collection, Istanbul.

art. His most notable contributions were in organizing the Istanbul art exhibitions of 1873 and 1875 and negotiating with Gérôme and the Goupil firm for art acquisitions for the sultan’s collection. These were early initiatives to develop public exhibition culture and significant art collections within the Ottoman capital. Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s self-styling was created in an Ottoman milieu in which the image of masculinity was highly contested, indeed the focus for debate and critique over forms and levels of Westernization.22 The stiff formality of his pose and his meticulous grooming devoid of signs of ostentation suggest a deliberate avoidance of any suggestion of the overly Westernized dandy or the fop who had become an object of ridicule in Ottoman novels of the late nineteenth century, most famously in the works by the artist’s friend, Ahmed Midhat Efendi.23 In this self-representation Şeker Ahmed Paşa has also downplayed his palace connection, eschewing full military dress uniform and, unlike Zonaro, he does not display the medals he had been awarded in such abundance and which he wears in his photographic portraits (fig. 110). So many of the photographs of him taken in his capacity as aide-de-camp to the sultan emphasize that his status derives from the Ottoman palace,

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but when it came to representing his artistic identity he created a fictional isolated environment. His derivative station is indicated in the numerous photographs of him with the sultan’s children. In other official photographs, such as those taken to celebrate the visit of the German delegation to Istanbul in 1882, Şeker Ahmed Paşa appears on the margins of the group of visiting foreign dignitaries. In his self-portrait he is not turning away from the palace, which after all had supported his artistic initiatives, but articulating an aspirational movement toward an autonomous Ottoman artistic identity. Şeker Ahmed Paşa had dedicated so much effort to cultivating art as a professional practice in Istanbul, and yet such a career path in the Ottoman capital was still not fully realized. The artist’s own career is a case in point. Throughout his life his artistic practice was accommodated alongside the demands of his increasing seniority as an eminent palace bureaucrat. Yet as Cemal Tollu, John Berger, Ahmet Gören, and others have argued, these were enabling constraints for him.24 Şeker Ahmed Paşa renders the phenomenological complexity of being in nature through the spatial ambiguities of his most compelling naïve landscapes.25 His painting Still Life with Catalogue (fig. 111) is similarly compelling. Linguistic signifiers for the artist are embedded within this still-life painting, creating a temporally distended self-representation. It is an oblique self-portrait hinted at by the two Salon catalogues on the table to the right prominently embossed with the years 1869 and 1870.26 These were the two Salons in which the young Ahmed Ali’s landscape paintings were hung when he was a student in Paris. Their inclusion renders them as an important career milestone in this late-career painting. But these are not the only dates on this canvas. A grape leaf prominent at the foremost edge of the table touches the spine of the 1870 catalogue and its tendril draws our eye diagonally over the edge of this table’s surface pointing toward the artist’s Ottoman signature and the contemporary date of the painting, thus connecting his early career to this later work. Moving our attention from right to left we find that the Ottoman signature and date is matched by the equivalent in Latin script on the left and the year 1905. The prominence of this dual autography in red, divergent linguistic signifiers of self, suspended on the two sides of this painting, linguistically and spatially register the cross-cultural formation of the Ottoman painter’s modern artistic identity.27 Attending more closely to the spatial field of this still life, we find analogous visual translations with the meticulously rendered mimetic realism in the painting of fruit and foliage embedded within a more malleably rendered space. The latter is evident in the radical painterly reductions of the curtain, the persistent blurring of any sharp distinction between table and wall created by a veiling effect of foliage at these points of spatial transition; even the Salon catalogues do not quite sit on the table surface. These subtle, embedded spatial instabilities in a painting that is positioned between still life and self-portraiture underscore Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s artistic practice as a process of aesthetic translation. In the artist’s earlier self-portrait we also encounter an implied dispersal of self. The formality of Şeker Ahmed’s attire and pose in this work suggests an interior, but the set-

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Figure 111. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, Still Life with Catalogue, 1905. Oil on canvas, 130 × 89 cm. M. S. G. S. Ü. Istanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi Koleksiyonu, Istanbul, Inv. No. 461 / 874.

ting is neither the studio nor a particular outdoor location. Instead the artist is encompassed by a painterly landscape, most distinct in the top half of the work. Dark foliage intensifies the focus on the artist’s head and our attention is drawn to the bright blue sky compressed between this dark mass and the edge of the artist’s represented canvas. Here a diffuse beam of sunlight bursts forth as if emanating from the surface of this canvas. At the painting’s lowest edge, the landscape transitions into indistinct brown textured brush marks, thereby dissolving the part of the representation that might otherwise ground the work at a particular site. This is landscape as representation; the product of the artist’s brush and his imagination. This part of the work is typical of the artist’s expressive landscapes, but conjoined in this painting with a representation of the artist himself it becomes an expression of his artistic vision.

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Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s self-portrait defines a modern Ottoman artistic identity that adapts and revises European conventions of academic portraiture, here given a distinctly Ottoman inflection. This representation of self is poised between European tradition and a carefully articulated notion of Ottoman masculinity, engaged with European culture yet distinct from a superficially imitative dandyism. Şeker Ahmed Paşa discreetly distances himself from his role as a palace bureaucrat and in doing so conveys all the gravitas of a desired emergent notion of the autonomous gentleman-artist.

C O S M O P O L I TA N

Osman Hamdi Bey’s studio self-portrait (fig. 112) presents a very different “scenario of production”28 for his modern Ottoman painting. Located in the artist’s profusely decorated studio, Osman Hamdi represents himself surrounded by all the accoutrements of his craft with his French wife reclining on the sedir (couch), posing for the painting on Osman Hamdi’s easel.29 This meticulously detailed painting of the artist’s atelier that doubles as a record of a discerning decorative art collector’s domestic interior seems to invite a straightforward realist reading, yet this carefully posed tableau, I would argue, offers an allegory of contemporary Ottoman painting. The pictorial relations that he establishes among sitter, artist, and painted representation within this work are a complex articulation of the intersection between differing Ottoman and European aesthetic traditions. Indeed, it proposes Osman Hamdi’s distinctive aesthetics as emergent from multiply refracted cross-cultural influences. This studio self-portrait is known to us only through a black and white reproduction credited to the Istanbul photographic firm of Pascal Sébah, which perhaps accounts for its relatively marginal status in debates about the artist’s work.30 Although undated, the existence of a photograph of the work dedicated to his friend Madame Barbier and dated 1880, and the age of the painter in his studio self-portrait, situates the work in the late 1870s, at the latest 1880, when Osman Hamdi was working in Istanbul consolidating his position as a senior Ottoman bureaucrat. Osman Hamdi had two studios in Istanbul, one in his main residence on the shores of the Bosporus in Kuruçeşme, the other in his summer residence in Gebze on the Marmora Sea. (The latter just outside Istanbul is now a house museum.) Given the 1884 date of his house in Gebze, this is not the studio depicted in his painting, so this is either his atelier in Kuruçeşme or, perhaps more likely, a fictional construction.31 Osman Hamdi’s aestheticized interior replete with splendid examples of art from the Islamic world is reminiscent of the interior assemblages of European Orientalist artists, collectors, and dealers from the same period. The most notable of these were Gérôme’s atelier in his home on the Boulevard de Clichy,32 Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall in ­Holland Park, and Albert Goupil’s interiors that were documented in the 1888 sale of his collection.33 Such collecting and decorating practices were part of broader processes of commodification of Islamic culture in the major European capitals in the late

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Figure 112. Sébah, print from glass plate negative of Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Artist at Work, n.d. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Istanbul, No. 8067.

nineteenth century. As David Roxburgh has demonstrated, private collecting practices and Orientalist domestic interiors influenced developing modes of display of Islamic art at international exhibitions, department stores, and museums. This was increasingly the case in the later decades of the nineteenth century as the sale of Islamic decorative arts became part of bourgeois commodity culture.34 Osman Hamdi’s self-portrait certainly nods to this European Orientalist convention of cosmopolitan self-fashioning via an “exotic” domestic interior. Yet the painting has a dense set of local resonances for the Ottoman painter that situates it as more than an imitation of European Orientalist convention. Comparing Osman Hamdi’s studio with two photographs of the interior of Islamic art collector William Henry Wrench’s home in Istanbul, we recognize similar approaches to domestic decoration (fig. 113 and fig. 114).35 These two photographs have been generically (and erroneously) titled Constantinople—Intérieur de maison turque, but instead they document the possessions of a man who served as the British Vice-consul, and later the Consul, in Istanbul between 1872 and 1896. Wrench had an important collection of Islamic art and some of his pieces now reside in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. As in the image of Osman Hamdi’s studio, in these photographs

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Figure 113. Guillaume Berggren, Constantinople—Turkish House Interior (Constantinople—​Intérieur de maison turque), n.d. Albumen print, 24.7 × 32.9 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14.)

of Wrench’s Istanbul home there is a profusion of fine examples of traditional Ottoman art: framed İznik tiles, plates and vases, fine embroideries, and decorative displays of traditional weaponry. A number of the artifacts in the painting and photographs have been relocated from a religious to a domestic setting, a secular recontextualization that transforms them into objects of aesthetic contemplation. Despite the consonance between these interiors, the presence of these Ottoman artifacts resonates differently. In Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait, they signify a proprietary relationship to his cultural heritage. These photographs of Wrench’s Istanbul home are particularly intriguing because a painting by Osman Hamdi Bey is a centerpiece on one wall (fig. 113). This suggests the complex entanglement of Orientalist collecting practices and modern Ottoman visual culture in the cosmopolitan capital in this period. The painting, Prayer in the Green Tomb of 1882, is one of a number of works that Osman Hamdi created of worshippers at the famed tomb of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed I (r. 1413–21) in Bursa. This tomb and the former capital’s other historic Ottoman monuments were the focus for a major restora-

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Figure 114. Guillaume Berggren, Constantinople—Turkish House Interior (Constantinople—​Intérieur de maison turque), n.d. Albumen print, 23.6 × 31 cm. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (96.R.14).

tion project supervised by Ahmed Vefik Paşa after the earthquake of 1855.36 Sultan Mehmed’s mosque and his tomb were particularly significant for the Ottoman elites who championed a revival of traditional Ottoman crafts to counter excessive reliance on European imported goods. Contemporary practitioners were exhorted to turn to these early Ottoman monuments for inspiration.37 Changing sensibilities about the Ottoman Empire’s heritage from the Tanzimat reform period onward were manifest in private collecting and display practices in a few elite Ottoman domiciles and later in the museological practices of the newly established public museums in the empire’s capital.38 These processes were occurring in a minor way in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in the Imperial Museum, whose collections included the Islamic arts.39 Indeed, the mosque lamp in Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait is, as V. Belgin Demirsar has established, remarkably similar to the sixteenth-century lamp brought into the museum’s collection in the Çinili Köşk from the Sokullu Mehmed Paşa Mosque in 1885.40 A fully fledged museum dedicated to traditional Ottoman art was not established in the capital when Osman Hamdi painted his

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self-portrait, and in the public sphere his professional interest as the director of the Ottoman Imperial Museum was focused primarily on ancient cultures and archaeology.41 In the domestic sphere, traditional Ottoman and European furnishing were intermixed in the homes of the modernizing Ottoman elite, reflecting changing consumption patterns in this period. The inclusion of European furniture resulted in a move away from traditional practices where portable furnishings, which were brought out or stowed away at will, created a more flexible domestic space. Photographs of Osman Hamdi in his studio reveal this eclectic mix of furnishings. Yet an historicizing impulse is more pronounced in his studio self-portrait. A Chinese jardinère and vase in this painting, included alongside superb examples of traditional Ottoman arts, are a testament to the discerning eclecticism of Osman Hamdi’s tastes. So too, the presence of figurative paintings suggests a worldly, liberal appreciation of the visual arts in the late Ottoman cultural context. All of the elements in this carefully assembled interior confer distinction on its owner, cumulatively signifying the refinement of this cosmopolite. Where an imported, cast-iron heater is seen in photographs of Osman Hamdi’s studio, a traditional Ottoman fireplace akin to those that Osman Hamdi repeatedly included in his paintings has been chosen for the self-portrait. This fireplace is similar to those in the Topkapı Palace harem, and yet its tiled patterning with layered borders is an amalgam of designs from various parts of the Rüstem Paşa Mosque in Istanbul.42 The fireplace is one of many artifacts in Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting that are not just part of a domestic display. Rather they are objects of utility for the painter, part of his studio repertoire, a fact underscored by the folios of drawings in the left and right foreground and what appear to be oil sketches on the side wall to the left of the reclining model, his wife. This studio is a cornucopia of possibility for the Ottoman painter. One looks across his oeuvre, making the connections between costumes and artifacts represented here and in his other works. The Zeybek headdress, for example, appears in the series of Osman Hamdi’s paintings of these warriors from the mountain region of Western Anatolia; the def in the left foreground and the tambur propped up on the end of the couch are both musical instruments that appear in his paintings of women. So too there are many and various Ottoman decorative arts in this work that are similar, rather than exact replicas of items used in his other paintings. His studio self-portrait thus lends itself to what has become a familiar reading of Osman Hamdi Bey’s art: that he redeploys a Western academic realist style to celebrate Ottoman cultural heritage.43 As such, Osman Hamdi’s paintings are interpreted as part of a larger movement of redefining cultural patrimony. This is a distinctly nineteenthcentury Ottoman “reinvention of tradition” that was a response to the profound sense of rupture from the past ushered in by the Ottoman state’s Tanzimat, Westernizing reform processes. Ahmet Ersoy, for example, argues that Osman Hamdi’s historical genre paintings such as The Miraculous Fountain and In the Tomb of the Princes exemplify a “modern historical consciousness” that was also manifested in contemporaneous

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Ottoman novels, plays, and museum displays.44 In this way his art relates to his various roles in the public arena: orchestrating historical displays and publications about the empire’s architecture and costume at the Ottoman pavilion of the 1873 Vienna exposition; conducting archaeological digs in Ottoman territories; and overseeing the displays of these and other artifacts as the director of the Imperial Museum from 1881. Following this line of thought, Osman Hamdi’s self-portrait stages the painter’s control over, as Wendy Shaw puts it, the “visualization of historical memory,” an argument that is all the more compelling when one takes into account the embedded selfportraiture that features in so many of his paintings.45 Shaw interprets a number of these works as allegories for various aspects of Osman Hamdi’s museum work. In The Miraculous Fountain, for example, Osman Hamdi represents himself reading the Koran surrounded by artifacts from the museum’s collection in the fountain room of the Çinili Köşk (the Tiled Pavilion). This 1478 building situated on Topkapı Palace grounds was remodeled as the venue for the antiquities museum in 1875. According to Shaw, in this painting, “As the curator of these collections, Osman Hamdi subsumes the age-old role of religious scholar within the modern role of secular educator.”46 She interprets Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait in a similar way, arguing that by presenting himself “as both a painter and a collector—​his real occupations—​[are] projected into an anachronistic Ottoman time and space even as he engages in a European activity . . . [thereby adopting] the image of the timeless Easterner as the strongest mode of denoting his Ottoman self and incorporat[ing] his daily Europeanate practices into a redefined Ottoman identity.”47 In other words, this painting expresses an archivist’s sensibility in the display of objects and is a self-consciously anachronistic projection of the artist’s identity. Furthermore, she argues that the painting expresses conventional gender divisions—​w ith woman as object of the painter’s gaze even as it enacts a “transfer of power from the Occidental to the Ottoman painter.”48 Such messages are conveyed through the seamless mimetic visual language of academic realism. Shaw is arguing, as many others have as well, that Osman Hamdi’s art is Western in form, but Ottoman in content. I am interested in another interpretive dimension that better addresses the aesthetic claims of these canvases sidelined by a purely museologically focused reading. More than any of his embedded self-representations, it is this studio self-portrait that articulated an allegory of Osman Hamdi Bey’s artistic practice. This painting situates Osman Hamdi Bey’s work in a negotiated relation between inherited Ottoman visual traditions and adopted French pictorial conventions. The key to this argument is the framed work of art on Osman Hamdi’s easel. This painting invokes one of the most oft-repeated themes within his oeuvre: women in quiet repose situated within profusely patterned domestic interiors—​a subject that particularly preoccupied him in the 1880s. There is a striking difference in this self-portrait between the deep recessional space of the artist’s studio and the compressed slice of space on the artist’s canvas-withinthe-canvas. In the painting on the artist’s easel, the decorative wall is rendered very close to the front of the picture plane, emphasizing the flat patterning of all of the

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elements contained within it. The dramatic spatial difference between the overall pictorial space of the studio scene and that of the easel painting within it reveals the careful process of artistic selection that Osman Hamdi adopted across his practice. It is this detail that establishes the relationship between the aesthetic inquiry of this painting and his images of women from the 1880s. Like Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait, a number of his images of women foreground the malleability of the spatial field through the simultaneous depiction of decorative flatness and perspectivally articulated depth. Through these works Osman Hamdi transformed his academic training in Paris and his aesthetic interest in the legacy of the Ottoman decorative arts into a distinctively cross-cultural pictorial inquiry that I have termed Ottoman Aestheticism.49 Understanding the aesthetics of his images of women is key to understanding his self-portrait as an allegory of modern Ottoman painting. John Frederick Lewis’s aestheticist harem paintings, with their decorously clothed women against intricately patterned Ottoman-Egyptian interiors, form a striking parallel with Osman Hamdi’s images of women. It is these paintings by Lewis that are most resonant with Osman Hamdi’s, not the harem and bath paintings by Gérôme with whom the Ottoman artist is more often compared. The parallel with Lewis’s work was not lost on one of the British critics when reviewing Osman Hamdi’s Jeune Émir à l’étude for the Academy in 1909.50 Both artists were perceived to exemplify the influence of Persian miniature painting. At different points in their careers they were each reproached for prioritizing draperies and decorative patterning over the rendering of flesh tones (a familiar critical reaction to Aestheticist tendencies).51 Like Lewis, there is an intriguing suggestion of play across Osman Hamdi’s oeuvre where he recombines the same elements for nuanced variations in aesthetic effect.52 This tendency toward subtle variation rather than direct iteration, the shift from Academic Realism to Aestheticism, is most obvious in Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait when we compare it with two other paintings that include a similar tiled fireplace, Khave Ocağı and After İftar. In these three paintings the chimney hood and decorative borders are all adapted from tile-patterned walls of Istanbul’s Rüstem Paşa Mosque.53 Yet each has a different combination of border patterning as if to emphasize, for the attentive viewer, Osman Hamdi’s processes of intervention and elaboration of decorative schema rather than his mimeticism. Despite the parallels, what distinguishes Osman Hamdi’s images of women from Lewis’s work is an emphasis on metamorphosis between different aesthetic conventions. Shapes and forms of objects are reiterated in decorative patterning on Osman Hamdi’s canvases and the representation of spatial depth morphs into flat patterned surfaces. Osman Hamdi’s images of women encapsulate mobility between aesthetic languages, translating from one to the other in ways that are fluid, intriguing, and aesthetically pleasing. It is these pictorial effects that constitute his Ottoman Aestheticism. We most often see such processes articulated through a play between two- and threedimensionality in Osman Hamdi’s work. This is evident in his Young Girl Placing a

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Vase of 1881 (fig. 90). The setting here is the corner of a room, where the intersecting angles of two walls are minimally indicated through the distinct shades of their surfaces, with a lighter sandy tone on the right picking up more of the room’s ambient light. It is on this wall, following the logic of naturalism, that the stronger light minimizes the distinctiveness of the wallpaper patterning. Yet here Osman Hamdi has created an effect that counters the angled recession of this wall because the gestural daubs of paint-patterning pull its most recessed edge to the very surface of the canvas. The resulting flatness is reinforced by the prominence of Osman Hamdi’s decorative, almost calligraphic signature that disregards the recession of the fictive wall on which it has been placed. So too Naile’s pose subtly creates a play between two and three dimensions, as she maintains a precarious verticality. Raised to her full height on the toes of her left foot, she steadies herself by angling her right leg onto the couch, which gives enough height for her steadying palms to press on the edge of the shelf so that she can reposition the vase with her fingertips. Naile is precariously posed, maintaining an elegant verticality that reinforces the shallow depth of space in this painting. The cushioned surface of the divan shows no fabric wrinkling, indentation, or other illusionistic effects of spatial depth that would result from her leaning heavily on its surface.54 Each of these elements in Osman Hamdi’s painting augments its emphasis on verticality and decorative surface. Indeed, the work as a whole dwells lightly on this edge, playing between surface patterning and shallow three-dimensional space. In this decorative interior, replete with cut flowers, nature is distilled into decorative arrangements in harmony with the floral patterned surfaces of Naile’s embroidered entari (dress) with its üç etek (three-paneled skirt), the divan, and the printed wallpaper. Like his model, the artist creates a very precise decorative effect. For her part, Naile is putting the finishing touches on her floral arrangement. With studied attention, her angled head focuses on the task at hand, making minor adjustments to the positioning of the vase so as to create just the right visual effect. To the left of her, the artist has created a pattern that echoes the shape of her cascading skirt and its floral embroidered edge through the careful placement of the stems that have been discarded from her arrangement. Most striking is the single stem of white blossoms propped up against the edge of the couch; its bloomed curve replicates the long line of embroidery along the edge of fabric that caresses Naile’s left heel (these flowers—​daubs of paint—​like the wallpaper above register the painterly surface of the work). The stem of a single white daisy poised precariously at a perpendicular angle halfway down this blossom, and a delicate single rose lying on the woven floor matting, together create a triangular geometry that echoes the shape of this part of Naile’s dress. This is not a portrait of Osman Hamdi’s wife. Instead, I aver, it is a decorative collaboration. Such synergies between the decorative endeavors of artist and model are further reinforced by a visual analogy between the sinuous line of Naile’s gently arched body extended by the cascading embroidered tails of her üç etek and the elongated flourish of the right stem of the “H” in Osman Hamdi’s signature above. Such a collaborative, distributed self-representation

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was also at play in his studio self-portrait, but before we return to this work we need to understand the role of synthesis and metamorphosis in his aesthetics. Once one attends to the details in Osman Hamdi’s images of women, such processes of metamorphosis between mimetic representation and patterning derived from the Ottoman decorative arts become abundantly evident. While in Young Girl Placing a Vase of 1881 the representation of real flowers is analogous to the patterning of the decorative embroidered gown, in other paintings it is İznik tile patterns that are reiterated in the distinctively Turkish oya (lace) or other border decorations on women’s dresses.55 This occurs in several places in Osman Hamdi’s From the Harem, 1880 (fig. 115), where the wall’s İznik tile border next to the woman on the left is reiterated three-dimensionally in part of the oya that trims her bodice and again where the ruched red edge of her standing companion’s skirt with its regularized openings iterates the geometry of the tiled border to the right of her. One could cite many other examples, as this effect is such a key part of the visual rhythm of many of Osman Hamdi’s paintings of women. There is a precedent for Osman Hamdi’s emphasis on the derivation of ornament from empirically observed natural forms in the 1873 Ottoman treatise on architecture. This collaboratively authored book was part of the official Ottoman contribution to the Vienna Exposition of 1873 that was supervised by Osman Hamdi’s father, İbrahim Edhem Paşa, in his role as director of the Ottoman commission to the exposition (Osman Hamdi was the Commissioner General).56 Its authors visually demonstrate the processes of stylized abstraction from natural forms into conventionalized patterning in the creation of traditional Ottoman floral architectural ornament.57 Such transformative practices, it was argued, also enabled Ottoman artists who designed ornamental patterning for the major Ottoman buildings and monuments to successfully appropriate from other cultural sources, including Assyrian, Egyptian, and Chinese models. These “exotic motifs [were] ‘naturalized’ and subordinated to the Ottoman conventions of design.”58 According to Ahmet Ersoy this secular state-sponsored treatise on Ottoman architecture and ornament represents a significant historiographic revision because it reflects “[a] reluctance to consider religion and race as the fundamental determinants of the Ottoman style [that] flies in the face of Orientalist preconceptions on Islamic architecture which were standard to nineteenth-century European scholarship . . . [thus making] it possible for the authors to find a proper niche for Ottoman architecture within the history of art as it was formulated in the west.”59 The emphasis within this text was on a critical and constructive dialogue with existing European theories of Ottoman architecture and ornament, in order to produce an Ottoman history and theory mobilized within an adapted European analytical framework. We find yet another precedent for the painter’s decorative strategies in the Ottoman costume book of 1873, which Osman Hamdi Bey created through collaboration with Marie de Launay.60 In the text of this volume an analogy is drawn between Ottoman architectural ornament and women’s costume. In the section on the Turkish lady of Constantinople, traditional elite women’s costuming in the Ottoman capital is likened

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Figure 115. Osman Hamdi, From the Harem, 1880. Oil on canvas, 56 × 116 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Photographer: Jenni Carter.

to architectural decoration that “takes up the underlying idea of the edifice, developing and reiterating it in every minute detail.”61 Here too practices of discerning cultural borrowing are emphasized; this time it is sumptuous fabrics drawn from across the Ottoman Empire (Damascus, Aleppo, or the imperial factories of Istanbul) that the authors note are combined to superb effect by the well-dressed elite lady of Ottoman Istanbul. Osman Hamdi Bey’s images of women, in which can be seen analogous processes of decorative transformation, are by no means a systematic engagement with Ottoman visual tradition. They make no claim to a “scientific” approach to Ottoman ornament or costume in the way that the 1873 architecture treatise or costume book did; instead ornament is deployed for its aesthetic effect. Nonetheless, traditional Ottoman ornament was an important resource for the painter (as the authors of the architectural treatise felt that it could be for contemporary Ottoman architects) and analogous procedures of translation and transformation are abundantly evident in Osman Hamdi’s paintings. So too we see a similar emphasis on constructive cross-cultural dialogue in the flexible way Osman Hamdi intermingles Ottoman ornament and European conventions of painterly representation. The metamorphic and synthetic effects that we see in Osman Hamdi’s images of women are self-reflexively formulated into a proposition about artistic practice in Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait. Osman Hamdi has made a significant choice. It is not the studio scene that is represented within his canvas on the easel; to have done so would have introduced an infinite regress of mimeticism into the scene. Instead it is an image of his wife, akin to his other Ottoman aestheticist images of women from the same period. As a result emphasis is placed on two distinct spatial zones and modes

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of representation, one within the canvas on the easel, the other in the studio. Such a distinction is reinforced by the sartorial discrepancy between the painter depicted in his studio (who wears Ottoman dress) and the painter who painted this studio self-portrait (who, as is well known from his many photographs, favored European dress). The painting reveals that Osman Hamdi has created his hybrid, metamorphic aestheticism while also mastering academic realism and that, like his sartorial crossing, he can move at will between the two. The artist has made a crucial choice in depicting his painting on the easel already framed. It is remarkable for its contradictory geometry. Looking closely we discern a difference between the upper and lower edges of this frame (fig. 116). The upper edge is horizontal, which situates Osman Hamdi’s painting almost parallel to the picture plane (an angle echoed by the horizontal lines within this painting on his easel); together they emphasize flatness. This is contradicted by the diagonal recession of the lower edge of the frame, which positions the work of art as if it is receding from right to left back into the room, an angle that emphasizes three-dimensionality and deeper space. The frame thus mediates between two different spatial zones by emphasizing both two-dimensionality (the frame’s horizontal top edge) and three-dimensionality (its diagonally receding lower edge). Looking more closely we see that the distinction between these two- and threedimensional zones are not absolute. The angle of the lower edge of the frame begins to usher the deeper space of the studio into the lower right corner of this painting on the easel. So too, the divergent angles of top and bottom framing edges suggests that this painting-within-the-painting is both a two-dimensional surface and a threedimensional object within the studio. By these means a spatial play between decorative flatness and the perspectival depth of illusionistic pictorial space is introduced. Thus, what Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait underscores is synthesis and the mutability of pictorial space. This is an effect we have seen in his Young Girl Placing a Vase, but in his self-portrait it is now presented as an allegory of painting. Although Osman Hamdi stands in front of his painting, poised with palette and maulstick in his left hand and with a brush poised to touch the palette in his right, it is not the act of painting that is foregrounded in this work. Rather, the artist is implicated within a structure that creates a directional move to the left. Instead of emphasizing the site of creative transaction between the artist and his canvas, what is foregrounded is the act of creation as a performative collaboration between the Ottoman artist and his wife as model. Through this transaction in the intimacy of the cosmopolitan artist’s home studio, in the fantasy space of painting Osman Hamdi’s French wife becomes an aestheticized Ottoman woman. He too is taking part in this imagined world of performative transformation, no longer wearing his everyday Western dress. Osman Hamdi Bey is turned away from his painting looking down at his palette, physically facing the same direction as his wife. It is her active look that most insistently draws our attention and this is all the more so because she is depicted twice, both in front of and behind the

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Figure 116. Sébah, print from glass plate negative of Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Artist at Work, n.d. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Istanbul, No. 8067 (diagram).

painter. This directional movement to the left is reinforced by the convergence of the two lines formed by the top and bottom framing edges of the painting on the easel; they are vectors that bind painter, model, and painting in the performance of this cross-cultural aesthetic synthesis. As a result of this spatial play at the very center of Osman Hamdi Bey’s studio selfportrait the painting becomes a meditation on the relationship between different visual traditions, an allegory of contemporary Ottoman painting. This is an alternative interpretation of this artwork, in terms of Osman Hamdi Bey’s relationship to Ottoman visual traditions and (given his wife’s key role) the inscription of gender relations. Osman Hamdi’s studio self-portrait is an aesthetic hybrid neither conforming to Ottoman visual tradition nor a complete assimilation of Western academic convention. Instead there is complex intertwined relationship between the two at its center. The work’s anomalous geometry revealed by the spatial discrepancies of the canvaswithin-the-canvas (akin to his aestheticized images of women) emphasizes processes of metamorphosis between one domain of representation and another. In these paintings there are shifting registers between the Ottoman decorative arts, the mimetic realism

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of academic painting, and the permeable spatial conventions of both European and miniature painting. The synthesis of these conventions is at the heart of Osman Hamdi’s cross-cultural aesthetics. In this analysis of Osman Hamdi Bey’s studio self-portrait I have been invoking Ottoman Aestheticism, a term I have coined for this impulse in Osman Hamdi’s art practice that is evident in his images of women of the 1880s, and that emphasizes processes of translation and synthesis between Ottoman and European visual languages. In the context of nineteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul this is a cosmopolitan aesthetic that presupposes the possibilities of multidirectional exchange and cultural synthesis. As such it is an aesthetic equivalent to Osman Hamdi’s cultural position that Edhem Eldem has so eloquently characterized in terms of persistent efforts to synthesize his Ottoman identity with the values he obtained from Western culture. Eldem cautions against viewing Osman Hamdi as a representative figure, instead arguing that he constitutes one position in the nineteenth-century Ottoman cultural milieu where the relationship with Western culture was highly contested and debated.62 My efforts to specify the particular visual language of his cosmopolitan aesthetics are compatible with other recent reassessments of Osman Hamdi’s oeuvre that challenge the notion that his engagement was a derivative, unidirectional emulation of retardataire French academic conventions, a position that remains within a teleological and Eurocentric history of art. Instead, Osman Hamdi’s work remains of interest to postcolonial histories of nineteenth-century art because in his cross-cultural aesthetics we find subtle procedures of adaptation that have recourse to the simultaneous reinvention of both foreign and local forms.

B E T W E E N PA L A C E A N D S T U D I O

This chapter has investigated how cross-cultural artistic encounters in Ottoman Istanbul were transmuted into new forms of self-fashioning and distinctive definitions of artistic practice through the genre of self-portraiture. I have focused on close interpretive analysis of these Ottoman self-portraits by seeking out their logic within the artists’ oeuvre rather than dwelling as I have in earlier chapters on larger artistic networks and patterns of artistic exchange. Doing so reveals that complex processes of cross-cultural encounter are found in the most intimate, sometimes solipsistic of these paintings that translate European art training into Ottoman Istanbul. Artistic identity was not articulated in terms of large art institutional structures for this generation of Istanbul’s painters, despite how important Osman Hamdi Bey, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, and Fausto Zonaro were to the development of the arts and the formation of such art institutions in the city. A comparison between these paintings and Frederic Leighton’s Self-Portrait of 1880 dramatically underscores the point. When invited to submit his representation to the prestigious Uffizi Gallery’s collection of artists’ self-portraits, Leighton rendered himself in his University of Oxford doctoral robes and his presidential medal, signifying the heights of his professional achievement as

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Figure 117. Frederic Leighton, Self-Portrait, 1880. Oil on canvas, 76.5 × 64 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence / The Bridgeman Art Library.

the incumbent president of the British Royal Academy (fig. 117). The iconography of his representation self-consciously references the self-portrait by the academy’s founding president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, thereby embedding Leighton’s professional artistic identity within a venerable institutional lineage.63 A local institutionally valorized identity such as this was not available to the generation of Istanbul painters who trained in Paris in the 1860s. (Osman Hamdi Bey painted his studio self-portrait some years before his appointment as the founding director of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, and even during his years at the helm of this new institution he did not paint a self-portrait in this role.) Neither did this generation define their identity in terms of collectivity, as was occurring among the French avant-garde in this period. Not until the second decade of the twentieth century would such a construction of artistic identity become important among the next generation of artists in Istanbul, best signaled by Feyhaman Duran’s group portrait from 1921.64 Nonetheless, in distinctive ways these self-portraits are all sociocentric. In Istanbul in this period the mainstays of that artistic sociality were the institutional support of palace patronage and the primary generative site of artistic production, the intimate semipublic space of the artist’s studio.

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Although all three careers were formed in the context of palace patronage, significantly it was the expatriate Fausto Zonaro who most directly signaled his debt to the support from that most powerful of Ottoman social institutions. His self-portrait with medals invoked these affiliations, thereby articulating a public identity. He was displaying himself as he wanted others to see him, with his medals as signifiers of prestige conferred by the Ottoman sultan. This is a presentation of self rather than a self-representation. He turned elsewhere, to the Sufi lodge and his studio, to create an allegory for his practice as an expatriate Istanbul artist. Although Şeker Ahmed Paşa was embedded within the palace hierarchy for more years, his role there was not as painter to the sultan. He eschewed this professional identity in his self-portrait in favor of a more hermetic studio self-representation. It was through studio self-portraiture that each of these artists thematized a distinctive scenario of artistic production. In each of these works of art self-representation in the act of painting entails a dispersal of self across the representational field. Fausto Zonaro generated an allegory for his practice in which the act of painting was construed as a physically immersive activity akin to absorption in Sufi religious ritual. In Osman Hamdi Bey’s self-portrait artistic identity was relational and articulated through a creative transaction between artist and model in the intimate space of the studio. The process of making art that incorporated two- and three-dimensionality was both riven and resolved in the creative transaction between the Ottoman painter and his French wife-model. Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s is the most solipsistic of these self-portraits, but his too is a carefully calibrated masculine identity that was particular to his generation’s art context in the Ottoman capital. The work successfully assimilates conventions for artistic self-representation learned through the Ottoman painter’s French academic art training to contested local codes of contemporary elite masculinity by eschewing the overly Westernized dandy in favor of an aspirational artistic identity as autonomous modern Ottoman gentleman painter. In this work we also find self hood dispersed across the field of representation, embedded within the artist’s imaginary landscape in a painting that presents the phenomenological divergence between the distance of sight and the immersive proximity of the artist’s touch. These self-portraits by late nineteenth-century Istanbul’s leading painters bespeak the propensity for cross-cultural self-representation in an artistic context that was in formation and in flux.

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EPILOGUE Istanbul Exchanges

When at last I ran him to earth, I saw at once that it was not precisely an artist, but rather a man of the world with whom I had to do. I ask you to understand the word artist in a very restricted sense, and man of the world in a very broad one. By the second I mean a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses; by the first, a specialist, a man wedded to his palette like the serf to the soil. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE”

Traveler, scholar, archaeologist, founder of the School of Fine Arts, director of the Ottoman Imperial Museum—​alongside all of these roles and career achievements the prodigious Osman Hamdi Bey maintained his practice as a painter, creating and exhibiting work in Paris, Berlin, London, Chicago, and Istanbul. He was a cosmopolitan and a polymath: a man of the world rather than a specialist. The “great traveller and cosmopolitan” described in the quotation above is not, however, the Ottoman artist, but Constantin Guys, the man made famous by the great French critic who penned these lines. Many of the artists that we have met in this book fulfill Charles Baudelaire’s idea of the man of the world.1 Situating Baudelaire’s painter of modern life in Istanbul in the final pages of this book is not a fanciful gesture on my part. The city is at the heart of his lyrical paean to nineteenth-century modernity. The cosmopolitan Ottoman capital may have been occluded from histories of nineteenth-century French modernism in our own time, yet in the work of Constantin Guys produced on “the operatic shores of the Bosphorus” Baudelaire found signs of modernity in contingent details that conveyed a disjunctive encounter between East and West.2 The French critic discovered within Guys carefully observed and passionately rendered crowd scenes at a bayram ceremony in Sultanahmet during the Crimean War, not a timeless Orient but a quintessentially modern spectacle: “Monsieur G. excels in treating the pageantry of official functions, national pomps and circumstances, but never coldly and didactically, like those painters who see in work of this kind no more than a piece of lucrative drudgery. He works with all the ardour

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of a man in love with space, with perspective, with light lying in pools or exploding in bursts, drops or diamonds of it sticking to the rough surfaces of uniforms and court toilettes.”3 Baudelaire’s Istanbul was one of the cities in which this man of the world, “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’,” immerses himself in the crowd, “at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself.”4 In this city, according to the critic, compelling art is born through Guys’ passionate encounter with cultural difference, and Baudelaire’s aesthetics privileges the disjunctive signifiers of cultural contact. It is the city’s prostitutes who are the indices of Istanbul’s modernity for Baudelaire (as they had been in Paris). But in the Ottoman capital the mark of this modernity is hybrid dress. Istanbul’s femmes galantes are, Baudelaire declares, women from the empire’s minority communities in southeastern Europe: “some have kept their national costume . . . all the tinsel of their native land; others, and these the more numerous, have adopted the principal badge of civilization, which for a woman is invariably the crinoline, but in some small detail of their attire they always preserve a tiny characteristic souvenir of the East, so that they look like Parisian women who have attempted a fancy-dress.”5 So too for Osman Hamdi, Istanbul women’s fashion was a key signifier of modernity. But on his city streets it is the play of bright colors and luxurious textures of elite dress that catch the eye, a world away from Baudelaire’s feminine masquerade of the demimonde. Three decades after Guys sketched street life in the city, Osman Hamdi created his painting of elite women in front of the Sultanahmet Mosque dressed à la mode strolling in this prominent public site (fig. 118). By now the bustle had replaced the crinoline in the world of contemporary international fashion, and among Istanbul’s fashion-conscious elite a new sartorial hybrid was born. In this painting the contours of the bustle are evident underneath the ferace (a coat worn out of doors by Ottoman women) and translucent face veils are modishly combined with matching parasols. This is an Ottoman painting of modern life. For all his concern with the veracity of Guys’ reportage, misrecognition was at the heart of Baudelaire’s modernist Orientalism. In his prose Sultan Abdülmecid and his administrative elite (the energetic avatars of the empire’s Tanzimat modernization) exhibit a magnificent aristocratic decadence. Within Baudelaire’s Istanbul pageant, the sultan displays “endless ennui” and the “Turkish functionaries” are “real caricatures of decadence, quite overwhelming their magnificent steeds with the weight of their fantastic bulk.”6 This remnant modern aristocratic spectacle is the catalyst for the genius of Guys, who transforms into art this quintessentially modern encounter of East and West. Contemporaneous accounts by artists who had worked for the sultan convey an altogether different image of the leader. During portrait sittings with British artist David Wilkie in 1840, Sultan Abdülmecid occasionally commandeered the painter’s brush in order to communicate his aesthetic preferences while undertaking a lively discussion of matters of contemporary public interest with the artist’s interpreter.7 (These interventions by Abdülmecid indicate the patron’s agency in image production that was

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Figure 118. Osman Hamdi, Women in Feraces, 1887. Oil on canvas, 81 × 131 cm. Yapı Kredi Painting Collection, Istanbul.

to become even more pronounced in the later collaboration between his successor Sultan Abdülaziz and Stanisław Chlebowski.) So too, according to Mary Adelaide Walker, Sultan Abdülmecid’s daughter Fatma Sultan was a lively and demanding interlocutor during her portrait sittings.8 Surely Constantin Guys, political artist for the Illustrated London News who spent so much time in Istanbul, was aware that the Tanzimat sultan was driving top-down reform within the empire. Does this indicate a divergence between the French art writer’s interpretation of these pictures and his illustratortraveler’s understanding of the political realities of the empire? Either way it reveals the instability of visual signifiers as they moved across cultural contexts and the persistence of Orientalist tropes in Europe. Half a century later Fausto Zonaro warned European Orientalists about the risk of misinterpreting cultures of the Near East when such contexts were rendered from the distant Western European capitals: Artists, you go and make paintings of Morocco in Paris, of Palestine in London, and of Istanbul in Berlin, and see what strange things . . . will arise! There is always the danger, not just with complex subjects, but in every situation, even in the most basic scenes of daily life, of making huge mistakes. In order to create art that has historical value, it is necessary to be either born in the environment that is to be depicted or to have lived there for a long time and to endeavour to not get too carried away by the power of the imagination.9

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This is a strident claim for the veracity of indigenous practice and the work of the expatriate. It expresses the caution of a European artist whose knowledge was accrued by long-term experience as an Istanbul resident, as official painter to the court of Sultan Abdülhamid II, for whom expertise was gained through extensive dialogue with locals. And yet the products of the artist’s brush belie this stern proscription of the imagination. Zonaro’s studio self-portrait, where he creates an analogy between Sufi ritual and the act of painting, is a particularly compelling example of the creative results of his cross-cultural experience. My study has shown this to be one example among many analogous, yet distinctive, conversations across cultures taking place in the work of the first generation of Paris-trained Ottoman painters who were translating their experiences abroad into this local context. Analyzing contemporary art in nineteenth-century Istanbul within networks of practice and patronage in and beyond the city has been at the core of this book’s project. These transcultural webs, often riven by mistranslation, were catalysts for creative invention for Ottomans as well as Orientalists. Webs of art and patronage connected Istanbul to art circles in Western Europe; they operated between the capital and other cities within the empire and also encompassed links between minority Armenian communities in Istanbul and within the Russian Empire in the Caucasus. Tracking these multisited and multidirectional art connections discloses the nodes and vectors that register the particularities of Istanbul as a place of cross-cultural contact while also situating Istanbul’s exchanges within a global history of nineteenth-century art.

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NOTES

INTRODUC TION

Epigraph: Serkis Bey (Sarkis Balian) quoted in Alfred de Caston, “Le grand mouvement architectural dans l’empire ottoman,” Revue de Constantinople, March 7, 1875, 418. 1. The sultan’s sketches were published in the following: Annie Brassey, Sunshine and Storm in the East, Or Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople (London: Longmans, Green, 1880), 113; Mieczysław Treter, “Rysunki Sułtana Abdul-Azisa,” Lamus 4 (1908–​9): 555–​63; Michał Pawlikowski, “Studio Talk: Cracow,” The Studio 57 (1913): 162–​63; M. Sami, “Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi 14 (Mart 1, 1330 / March 1, 1914), reprinted in Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, 1911–​1914, ed. Yaprak Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2007), 185–​86. 2. M. Sami, “Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim.” 3. “M[onsieur] Goupil received a request for a painting for the Sultan: he was sent a certain number of them and I have myself overseen the type and quality of the consignments. I assume His Majesty was happy since he bought some for sixty thousand francs. All the paintings were addressed to Ahmed, of whose probity I am sure . . . I [also] had them send to his address the Sultan’s first painting [of mine] (Bachi Bouzoucks [sic] around a fire).” Gérôme (Paris) to Chlebowski (Istanbul), 29 October 1875, Stanisław Chlebowski Papers, Przb.Rkp.237_04: 85–​86, Jagiellonian Library, Kraków (hereafter Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library). 4. Ibid. 5. “History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

17 5

and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 23. 6. On January 1, 1882, Osman Hamdi Bey was appointed director of the new Academy of Fine Arts, which opened on March 2, 1883. For a history of this institution see Mustafa Cezar, “Sanayi-i Nefise’den Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi’ne. I. Dönem: 1882–​1928 Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi,” in Sanayi-i Nefise Muallimleri Resim ve Heykel Sergisi, ed. Salim Yavaşoğlu (Istanbul: Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi, 2004), 8–​37. The Apartment of the Heir Apparent in the Dolmabahçe Palace was allocated to house the Museum of Painting and Sculpture by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on September 20, 1937. Kaya Özsezgin, Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi İstanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi Koleksiyonu (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık Ticaret ve Sanayi A. Ş., 1996), 16. 7. Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd, Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). On the British Royal Academy see James Fenton, School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts (London: Royal Academy of Arts and Salamander Press, 2006). On the French Academy see Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New York, NY: Phaidon, 1971), and June Hargrove, ed., The French Academy: Classicism and Its Antagonists (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990); on the earlier period see Hannah Williams, Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015); and for the French Salon, Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Histoire du Salon de peinture (Paris: Klincksieck, 2003). In Paris and London concepts of national culture were created and affirmed through the venues for training and exhibiting art, but they were also sites of cosmopolitan interaction as artists from around the globe trained in the major artists’ studios. The Ottoman painters who came to Paris in this century did not embrace the anti-institutional avantgarde. Like other ambitious international artists they knew the power of career success in these French and British institutions where reputations were launched and consolidated. Osman Hamdi Bey, for instance, was well aware of the defining importance of these sites when he wrote to his father in 1868, pleading his case to stay in Paris to develop and sustain his passion for artistic practice. Osman Hamdi Bey (Paris) to İbrahim Edhem Paşa (Istanbul), 26 June 1868, private collection Edhem Eldem, ­Istanbul. 8. The district of Pera, home to the foreign embassies, as well as many of the city’s expatriates and minority communities, was a particularly intense “contact zone” for European and Ottoman culture in the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan capital. The photographic firm Abdullah Frères occasionally exhibited artists’ work in their photographic studio in Pera. Paintings were also exchanged as gifts and through informal sales. Ottoman painter Şeker Ahmed Paşa, for example, gave a number of his paintings to visiting foreign dignitaries; see Ahmet Kamil Gören, “(Şeker) Ahmed Paşa’yı Yazmak (1841–​1907),” in Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, ed. Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu and İlona Baytar (Istanbul: TBMM Milli Saraylar Daire Başkanlığı, 2008), 19. Armenian artist Mgrdich (Mıgırdiç) Givanian is exemplary of an artist who displayed his work in numerous different contexts. As well as painting theatre sets and murals for key Ottoman palaces, he is known to have exhibited his works in the ABC club exhibitions and at the Russian Embassy in 1894. He even sold his paintings on the streets of Pera, displaying them in prominent

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places such as outside the Russian Embassy. See Raphael Shishmanian, “Mgrdich Givanian,” in Sovetakan Arvest 1 (1957): 43–​47; Mayda Saris, Mıgırdiç Civanyan: Bir İstanbul Ressamı (Istanbul: Raffi Portakal Antikacılık Müzayede Organizasyon ve Danışmanlık, 2006); and Garo Kürkman, Armenian Painters in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–​1923, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Matüsalem Uzamlık ve Yayıncılık, 2004), 1:404–​6. 9. İpek Duben, “Eleştiri ve Ölçütleri: 1876–​1923,” Türk Resmi ve Eleştirisi: 1880–​1950 (Istanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2007), 183–​90. 10. So many of the social histories of French and British art that have developed over the last four decades have been premised upon close study of the art criticism of the period. Perhaps the most well-known early example is T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). 11. Michael Baxandall astutely expounded the pitfalls of an uncritical approach to artistic influence. Michael Baxandall, “Excursus against Influence,” in Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 58–​62. 12. For an account of the nineteenth-century history of drawing and painting as part of military training in Istanbul from the years when it was first introduced in the Ottoman Imperial Army Engineering School (Mühendishane-i Berrî-i Hümâyun) and subsequent generations of artists and teachers who emerged from the military schools, see Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Kültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık Vakfı Yayınları, 1995), 1:373–​99. 13. See Semra Germaner, “The Interpretation of Pictorial Space in Nineteenth-century Ottoman Landscape Painting,” in The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism, ed. Zeynep İnankur, Reina Lewis, and Mary Roberts (Istanbul: Pera Museum; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 233–​40. 14. Hanioğlu provides a comprehensive summary of the Ottoman context in the early nineteenth century in the first chapter of his book: Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 6–​41. His book is a key survey of nineteenth-century Ottoman cultural and intellectual history. See also Ezel Kural Shaw and Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revolution and Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Reşat Kasaba, ed., Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4, Turkey in the Modern World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 15. For an overview of the major legislative, administrative, and political reforms, the key statesmen who engineered them, and the socioeconomic changes that took place during the Tanzimat period, see Carter Vaughn Findley, “The Tanzimat,” in Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4, Turkey in the Modern World, 11–​37, and Hanioğlu, Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 72–​108. For a summary of the major political events, political strategy, and ideology during the key phases of Sultan Abdülhamid’s rule, see Benjamin C. Fortna, “The Reign of Abdülhamid II,” Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4, Turkey in the Modern World, 38–​61, and Selim Deringil, The Well-protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–​1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). 16. Hanioğlu, Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 4.

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17. The key work on the intellectual history of this period revealing the synthesis of Enlightenment ideas with Islam in the writings of the Young Ottomans is Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). 18. Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 19. Edhem Eldem, “Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital,” in The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul, ed. Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 135–​206. 20. For a study of the creation of the city as an Ottoman capital through the interpretation, appropriation, and transformation of Eastern Rome after capture of the city in 1453, see Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). For a study of the structure, symbolism, and political and ceremonial function of the Topkapı Palace see Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 21. Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 22. For an analysis of the mural tradition see Günsel Renda, “The Birth of a New Genre of Painting,” in A History of Turkish Painting, ed. Günsel Renda, Turan Erol, Adnan Turani, Kaya Özsezgin, and Mustafa Aslıer (Geneva: Palasar; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 69–​86; Günsel Renda, “Westernisms in Ottoman Art: Wall Paintings in 19th Century Houses,” in The Ottoman House, Papers from the Amasya Symposium, 24–​27 September 1996, ed. Stanley Ireland and William Bechhoefer (Ankara: British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara and the University of Warwick, 1996), 103–​9; Aykut Gürçağlar, Hayali İstanbul Manzaraları (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2005); Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, Günsel Renda, and Zeren Tanındı, “From Walls to Canvases,” in Ottoman Painting (Istanbul: Banks Association of Turkey, 2010), 301–​11; Wendy Shaw, “From Old Niches to New Paintings,” in Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 11–​39. 23. For an analysis of the ceremonies associated with the installation of these portraits and the subsequent controversy they provoked, see Edhem Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2004), 126–​31, and Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 26–​28. 24. For an account of the paintings exhibited in the Ottoman Pavilion at the Paris exposition of 1867, see Salahéddin Bey, La Turquie à l’Exposition Universelle de 1867 (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1867). The Ottoman sultanate, like the Persian shahs, utilized royal portraiture in the international arena in the nineteenth century. The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, ed. Selmin Kangal, trans. Priscilla M. Işin, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2000); Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785–​1925, ed. Layla S. Diba and Maryam Ekhtiar, exh. cat. (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, with I. B. Tauris, 1998); Qajar Portraits: Figure Paintings from Nineteenth Century Persia, ed. Julian Raby, exh. cat. (London: Azimuth Editions, 1999).

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25. For an account of the complexities of Ottomanism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Carter Vaughn Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–​1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 26. Deringil, Well-protected Domains; Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 768–​96. 27. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, eds., Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–​1914 (Istanbul: SALT/ Garanti Kültür A. Ş., 2011). See also Ahmet Ersoy, “Architecture and the Search for Ottoman Origins in the Tanzimat Period,” in Muqarnas 24 (2007): 117–​39, and Ahmet A. Ersoy, “On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’: Architectural Revival and Its Discourse during the Abdülaziz Era (1861–​76)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000). 28. On the Ottoman use of visual culture at the World’s Fairs, see Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Ersoy, “Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’,” and Ahmet Ersoy, “A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye Album,” Muqarnas 20 (2003): 187–​207. On the role of public ceremony as a tool of state power across the empire and internationally during Sultan Abdülhamid II’s reign, see Deringil, Well-protected Domains, and Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–​1914 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 29. Deringil, Well-protected Domains; William Allen, “The Abdul Hamid II Collection,” History of Photography 8, no. 2 (1984): 119–​45; Şinasi Tekin and Gönül Alpay Tekin, “Imperial Self-Portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed in the Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s Photographic Albums—​Presented as Gifts to the Library of Congress (1893) and the British Museum (1894),” Journal of Turkish Studies 12 (1988). 30. Finbarr Barry Flood refers to this trend within the subfield of the history of Islamic art as “the phenomenon of art history interruptus . . . most authors seem to take for granted that no art worthy of comment was produced in the Islamic world after 1800. This bias for the historical is reflected in the absence of contemporary artifacts and monuments from the (predominantly American and European) collections, exhibitions and texts that shaped the nascent field of Islamic art history.” Finbarr Barry Flood, “From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art,” in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2007), 33. 31. There are exceptions to this decline narrative. Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, Günsel Renda, and Zeren Tanındı’s history of Ottoman painting, for example, focuses on the changing social function of painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided the impetus for a shift from miniature to easel painting, exploring the transitional role of mural painting in this shift. Serpil Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting. See also Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur’s important cultural history of Ottomans and Orientalists in nineteenth-century Istanbul: Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists (Istanbul: İşbank, 2002). 32. Flood, “Prophet to Postmodernism?” 36. Sibel Bozdoğan notes a similar consignment

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of Turkish modern architecture within area studies histories: “Modern architecture was regarded as an imported and ‘alien’ discourse not indigenous to these societies—​a muchlamented symbol of the ‘contamination’ of their authentic cultural expressions. Little attention, if any, was devoted to the efforts of non-Western cultures to make modern architectural concepts, forms, and techniques originating in Europe their own. ‘Modern’ was assumed to be an exclusively European category that non-Western others could import, adopt, or perhaps resist but not reproduce from within. In the case of Turkey, not only twentieth-century modernism but also the histories of Ottoman baroque, neoclassic, and other European architectural imports of the nineteenth century were, until recently, little known to an English-speaking readership.” Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 8. 33. Flood, “Prophet to Postmodernism?” 34. Flood is invoking Johannes Fabian. In response to this perceived lacuna in the field, in recent years there has emerged a particularly energetic reassessment of cultural contact and exchange between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. See Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728–​1876 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011); Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century; and the special issue of Ars Orientalis devoted to an historiographic reassessment of cultural encounters between Moghuls, Persians, Ottomans, and Europeans in the eighteenth century: Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Barry Flood, eds., “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century,” Ars Orientalis 39 (2011). 34. On the introduction of Impressionism into Ottoman art, see Wendy Shaw, “Landscape Painting and Impressionism,” in Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 103–​5. 35. These questions about the cultural transfer of nineteenth-century European academic art conventions have also been debated in the field of modern Asian Art; see John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998), 11–​27. In the Indian context debate has focused in particular on the work of Raja Ravi Varma: see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–​ 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–​1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Geeta Kapur, “Representational Dilemmas of a Nineteenth-century Painter: Raja Ravi Varma,” in When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); Partha Mitter, “The Artist as Charismatic Individual: Raja Ravi Varma,” in Asian Art, ed. Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 167–​ 76. In Indonesia analysis has focused on the work of Raden Saleh; see Werner Kraus, “First Steps to Modernity: The Javanese Painter Raden Saleh (1811–​1880),” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi, and T. K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006). See also Esra Akcan’s important book on processes of visual translation in Turkish modern architecture: Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 36. İpek Aksüğür Duben, “Osman Hamdi’nin Resminde Epistemolojik Çelişkiler,” in Osman Hamdi Bey Kongresi. Bildiriler, 2–​5 Ekim 1990, ed. Zeynep Rona (Istanbul: Mimar Sinan

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Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1992); İpek Aksüğür Duben, Türk Resmi ve Eleştirisi: 1880–​1950 (Istanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2007); and Mary Roberts, “Osman Hamdi Bey and Ottoman Aestheticism,” in Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850–​1900, ed. Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowksi (Aldershot: Ashgate, in press). 37. John Berger, “Seker Ahmet and the Forest,” in About Looking (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980), 79–​86. 38. Recent contributions to this debate include Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham, eds., Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Julie Codell, ed., Transculturation in British Art, 1770–​1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012); Kathleen M. Davidson, “Exchanging Views: Empire, Photography and the Visualisation of Natural History in the Victorian Era” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2011). 39. This significant and timely question was posed by Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowksi in their symposium held at the Clark Art Institute on October 30–​31, 2009, and in their forthcoming book: Clayson and Dombrowksi, Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? 40. The reference is of course to T. J. Clark’s statement in his 1974 article that sparked ongoing debate: “I’m not interested in the social history of art as part of a cheerful diversification of the subject, taking its place alongside the other varieties—​formalist, ‘modernist’, sub-Freudian, filmic, feminist, ‘radical’, all of them hot-foot in pursuit of the New.” T. J. Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 561–​62. 41. For a study of art in French colonial territories in the Maghreb see Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880–​1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a study of print culture, photography, and architecture in Algiers in the same period see Zeynep Çelik et al., Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); and Zeynep Çelik’s recent book—​Empire, Architecture, and the City—​an important comparative study of architecture, city planning, and public ceremony in both French colonial and Ottoman contexts. 42. Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Nineteenth-century Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For an elaboration of the term as both cultural position, metaphor, and rhetorical strategy see especially page 10. 43. Chlebowski hosted Gérôme and commenced a long-standing dialogue with the artist during which they exchanged photographs, costumes, and other artifacts. They set up bank accounts for each other in Istanbul and Paris to facilitate this ongoing exchange. Gérôme gave feedback to his former student Chlebowski on his compositional drawings for his major painting Entry of Mehmed II into Constantinople, sending him studies of historical costumes from the print collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and drawings made by one of his students of historical weaponry from the Artillery museum at the Invalides in Paris. Gérôme to Chlebowski, 21 July 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian

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Library, Przb.Rkp.237_04.T1: 81–​82. Mary Walker facilitated Henriette Browne’s access to elite Ottoman harems. See Mary Roberts, “Contested Terrains: Women Orientalists and the Colonial Harem,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 191–​97. 44. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 16. 45. By the Light of the Crescent Moon: Images of the Near East in Danish Art and Literature, 1800–​1875, ed. Birgitte von Folsach, exh. cat. (Copenhagen: David Collection, 1996); War and Peace: Ottoman-Polish Relations in the 15th–​19th Centuries, ed. Selmin Kangal, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, 1999); Orientalizm w malarstwie, rysunku i grafice w Polsce w XIX i 1. Połowie XX Wieku, ed. Anna Kozak and Tadeusz Majda, exh. cat. (Warsaw: National Museum of Warsaw, 2008); and Russia’s Unknown Orient: Orientalist Painting 1850–​1920, ed. Patty Wageman and Inessa Kouteinikova, exh. cat. (Groningen: Groninger Museum; Rotterdam: NAI, 2010). 46. Geertz provides this succinct definition of thick description: “The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics.” Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 28. 47. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 4. Dainotto argues that Michele Amari’s Sicilian Orientalist history, Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, was a “Mediterranean perspective on universal history” (ibid., 217) in dialogue with Arab historiography that formed a counterpoint to hegemonic European histories of the day. Amari engaged Ibn Khaldūn’s cyclical rather than teleological model of history to redefine the concept of Europe. He was constructing a different historiography to instate the particularities of a Sicilian identity via the distinct Arab influence on the island. In doing so he argued for the southern origins of “social democracy brought to Europe via Islam.” See “Orientalism, Mediterranean Style: The Limits of History at the Margins of Europe” (ibid., 172–​217). 48. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18. 49. Ibid., 20. Todorova argues that Balkanism is especially marked by distinctions of class and race. On the one hand class is inflected by a “virtual parallel between the East End of London and the East End of Europe,” whereas race distinctions are ambiguously premised upon the “Balkans as a racial mixture, as a bridge between races” (ibid., 18–​19). 50. Milica Bakić-Hayden defines nesting orientalisms as follows: “While there are many overlapping images of ‘the Orient’ or ‘the East’ as ‘other’, I will focus on that which designates the Balkan lands of Ottoman-ruled Europe. The gradation of ‘Orients’ that I call ‘nesting orientalisms’ is a pattern of reproduction of the original dichotomy upon which Orientalism is premised. In this pattern, Asia is more ‘East’ or ‘other’ than eastern Europe; within eastern Europe itself this gradation is reproduced with the Balkans perceived as most ‘eastern’; within the Balkans there are similarly constructed hierarchies. I argue that the terms of definition of such a dichotomous model eventually establish conditions for its own contradiction.” Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 918.

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51. Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 10. 52. Ibid., 6. 53. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994); Edward Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Edward Said, “The Music Itself: Glen Gould’s Contrapuntal Vision,” Vanity Fair 46, no. 3 (1983). For commentaries on this aspect of his work see Homi Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell, eds., Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For analysis of this issue in the visual arts see Mary Roberts, “Karşıtlıklar: Said, Sanat Tarihi ve 19 Yüzyıl İstanbul’unda Osmanlı Kimliğini Yeniden Keşfetmek”/“Counterpoints: Said, Art History and the Reinvention of Ottoman Identity in Nineteenth-century Istanbul,” in Uluslararası Oryantalizm Sempozyumu, 9–10 Aralık 2006, ed. Lütfi Sunar (Istanbul: Istanbul Büyükşehir, 2007), and Mary Roberts, “Nazlı’s Photographic Games: Said and Art History in a Contrapuntal Mode,” Patterns of Prejudice, 48, no. 5 (2014): 460–78. 54. On Gentile Bellini’s visit to Istanbul and his commissions for Fatih Sultan Mehmet see Ressam, Sultan ve Portresi: Gentile Bellini’ye göre Fatih Sultan Mehmet / The Artist, the Sultan and His Portrait: Mehmed the Conqueror According to Gentile Bellini, ed. Münevver Eminoğlu, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 1999), and Bellini and the East, ed. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; London: National Gallery, 2005). 55. See Nuri Yurdusev, ed., Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 56. Research by Edhem Eldem and Vasıf Kortun has dispelled the widely held view that Osman Hamdi’s teacher was Gérôme, establishing instead that it was Gustave Boulanger. For a discussion of this issue see Edhem Eldem, “Osman Hamdi Bey ve Oryantalizm,” Dipnot 2 (2004): 48. 57. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71, no. 5 (May 1983): 118–​31, 187–​ 91, republished in Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–​59. For recent revisionary accounts of his art see Scott Allan and Mary Morton, eds., Reconsidering Gérôme (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010). The most thorough study of Gérôme’s art is Gerald Ackermann’s catalogue raisonné: Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme with a Catalogue Raisonné (London: Sotheby’s, 1986). Ackermann’s catalogue raisonné was revised and updated in 1992 and again in a French edition in 2000: Gerald. M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme (Courbevoie: ACR Edition Internationale, 2000). See also the recent exhibition on the painter, The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–​1904) /  Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–​1904): L’histoire en spectacle, ed., Laurence des Cars, Dominique de Font-Réaulx, and Edouard Papet, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Orsay and Éditions SkiraFlammarion, 2010). On Gérôme’s pedagogic impact in America see H. Barbara Weinberg, The American Pupils of Jean-Léon Gérôme (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1984). 58. Two important analyses of contemporary collecting practices are Roger Benjamin, “Postcolonial Taste: Non-Western Markets for Orientalist Art,” in Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, ed. Roger Benjamin, exh. cat. (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997), 32–​40,

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and Nicholas Tromans, “Bringing It Home? Orientalist Painting and the Art Market,” in İnankur, Lewis, and Roberts, Poetics and Politics of Place, 65–​74. 59. The reference is to Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian analysis of international exhibitions; Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995), 59–​88. 60. Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 57. 61. Çelik, Displaying the Orient; Wendy Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 62. The literature on Orientalist portraits and self-portraits is extensive; see for example, Gail Ching-Liang Low, “White Skin / Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism,” New Formations 9 (1989): 83–​103; Marjorie Garber, “The Chic of Araby: Transvestism, Transexualism and the Erotics of Cultural Appropriation,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 223–​47; Ali Behdad, “Allahou-Akbar! He Is a Woman: Colonialism, Transvestism, and the Orientalist Parasite,” in Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 113–​32; Dianne Sachko Macleod, “Cross-cultural Cross-dressing: Class, Gender and Modernist Sexual Identity,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, ed. Julie Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 63–​85; Mary Roberts, “Cultural Crossings: Sartorial Adventures, Satiric Narratives, and the Question of Indigenous Agency in Nineteenth-century Europe and the Near East,” in Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, ed. Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 70–​94; Christine Riding, “Travellers and Sitters: The Orientalist Portrait,” in The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, ed. Nicholas Tromans, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2008), 48–​61.

1. O T T O M A N I M P E R I A L P O R T R A I T U R E A N D T R A N S C U LT U R A L AESTHETICS

1. Orhan Pamuk, “Bellini and the East,” in Other Colors: Essays and a Story, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 315. Pamuk’s essay about the contemporary reception of Bellini’s portrait is a response to two exhibitions: Bellini and the East, ed. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; London: National Gallery, 2005) and Ressam, Sultan ve Portresi: Gentile Bellini’ye Göre Fatih Sultan Mehmet / The Artist, the Sultan and His Portrait: Mehmed the Conqueror According to Gentile Bellini, ed. Münevver Eminoğlu, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 1999). 2. For Yahya Kemal, Pamuk argues, this statement is symptomatic of the “Muslim writer’s dissatisfaction with his own culture. He is also succumbing to the common fantasy of effortless adaptation to the artistic products of an utterly different culture and civilization, that this could somehow be accomplished without changing one’s soul.” Pamuk, “Bellini and the East,” 315. Pamuk expresses his indebtedness to poet Yahya Kemal in his own struggle to find a way back into Ottoman heritage while also grappling with the exci-

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sions, chauvinisms, and doubts in the work of this early republican nationalist poet. For an elaboration of Pamuk’s approach to Yahya Kemal and his contemporaries and their approach to the Ottoman past, see Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). 3. Pamuk, “Bellini and the East,” 316. 4. John Young, A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey, from the Foundation of the Monarchy to the Year 1808. Engraved from Pictures Painted at Constantinople by Command of Sultan Selim the Third. With a Biographical Account of Each of the Emperors (London: William Bulmer, 1815). I am grateful to the staff at the Topkapı Palace archives for facilitating my access to the Young Albums and the other portraits of the Ottoman sultans in 2005. 5. Nancy D. Munn, “Excluded Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 461. 6. Ibid., 462. 7. Ibid., 461. 8. See the following examples of Günsel Renda’s important work: Günsel Renda, “Selim III’s Portraits and the European Connection,” in Turkish Art: 10th International Congress of Turkish Art / Art Turc: 10e Congrès international d’art turc (Geneva: Fondation Max Van Berchem, 1999), 567–​77; Günsel Renda, “Art and Diplomatic Relations: The Story of an Ottoman-British Project in London,” in Cultural Encounters and Cultural Differences, First International Hacettepe Conference (Ankara: Hacettepe University, 1999), 227–​38. 9. Young, “Preface,” in Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . ., 2. 10. The exchange of portraits was also important in the Persian court in this period. Selim III’s portrait was hung beside that of the Shah and Napoleon in the Crown Prince’s palace in Tabriz. See Julian Raby, Qajar Portraits (London: Azimuth with Iran Heritage Foundation, 1999), 14. 11. Documentation [TSM 570/2] about this commission and its purpose is held in the Topkapı Palace archives; see Günsel Renda, “Portraits: The Last Century,” in The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, ed. Selmin Kangal, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2000), 473. See also Günsel Renda, “The Bosphorus in Miniature Painting,” P, Art, Culture, Antiques 4 (Fall–​Winter 2000–​1): 52–​67. 12. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 47. 13. For an analysis of the history of Ottoman diplomacy and the significance of the move to establish resident diplomacy, see A. Nuri Yurdusev, ed., Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 14. Stanford Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Selim III, 1789–​1807 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 15. In the late sixteenth century the sultans were portrayed within numerous illustrated histories that took the form of genealogies, world histories, and dynastic biographies. For the analysis of the multiple visual sources for these albums and a comparative study of Ottoman, Mughal, Persian, and European dynastic imagery from this period, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “Word and Image: The Serial Portraits of Ottoman Sultans in Comparative Perspective,” in Kangal, Sultan’s Portrait, 22–​61, and the essays by Julian Raby, Filiz Çağman, and Serpil Bağcı in the same volume. Emine Fetvacı reveals the patterns of elite

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patronage within the Ottoman court in this period that supported the production of rich illustrated histories; Emine Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 16. The vicissitudes of the sultans’ portrait tradition is too complex to account for here. For an overview of this tradition see Kangal’s Sultan’s Portrait and especially the bibliography of this important exhibition catalogue in which are listed many of the key studies of this genre of Ottoman representation. For an analysis of these portraits within the broader tradition of Ottoman art, see Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, Günsel Renda, and Zeren Tanındı, Ottoman Painting (Istanbul: Banks Association of Turkey, 2010). 17. Renda, “Portraits: The Last Century,” 474. For an analysis of Levnî’s Kebir Musavver Silsilenâme in the context of early eighteenth-century Ottoman court history see Gül İrepoğlu’s essay “Innovation and Change,” also in Kangal’s Sultan’s Portrait, 378–​411. 18. Renda, “Portraits: The Last Century,” 489. 19. As historians of the Ottoman Empire have demonstrated, by the nineteenth century Ottoman historiography had a long and complex history and it is within this context that the vignette’s celebratory narrative is to be situated. This officially sponsored project, like earlier dynastic albums, was unequivocally celebratory in tone. This is hardly surprising given the context of gift exchange for which the Young Album was originally designed. The literature is extensive; see for example, Cemal Kafadar, “The Myth of the Golden Age: Ottoman Historical Consciousness in the Post-Süleymânic Era,” in Süleymân the Second and His Time, ed. H. İnalcık and C. Kafadar (Istanbul: Isis Press 1993), 37–​48; Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Colin Heywood, “Between Historical Myth and ‘Mythohistory’: The Limits of Ottoman History,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988): 315–​45; Michael Ursinus, “Byzantine History in Late Ottoman Turkish Historiography,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 10 (1986): 211–​22; Michael Ursinus, “ ‘Der schlechteste Staat’: Ahmed Midhat Efendi (1844–​1913) on Byzantine Institutions,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11 (1987): 237–​43; Michael Ursinus, “From Süleymân Pasha to Mehmet Fuat Köprülü: Roman and Byzantine History in Late Ottoman Historiography,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988): 305–​14; Ercüment Kuran, “Ottoman Historiography of the Tanzimat Period,” in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 422–​29. 20. Hanioğlu, Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 48. 21. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 171. 22. Renda, “Portraits: The Last Century,” 449. 23. This is a far more complex history than I can do justice to here. See Hanioğlu’s important account of the vicissitudes of these international relations across the nineteenth century: Hanioğlu, Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 49. 24. For a more extended account of these events, see ibid., 53–​54. 25. Young himself commented on the costliness of the mezzotint process in his preface: “To those who are in the habit of collecting Works of Art, it will scarcely be necessary for me to point out, how materially these Portraits differ from plates engraved in the line manner, which, when finished, will produce an impression of several thousand copies;

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whereas of the Mezzotintos which constitute the present volume, I can avail myself but of a very limited impression; as the process of colour-printing tends so materially to injure the plates. The impressions have all been printed in colours from the Pictures, and each Portrait has been attentively revised by myself; and although, from the number and variety of the characters, much time, labour, and patience have been required, I shall, nevertheless, be amply repaid if the work be allowed to bear the marks of uniformity, fidelity and care.” Young, Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . , 4. 26. Ibid., 2. 27. The entry for this book in the bibliographic catalogue of the John Roland Abbey collection states that “Dibden, incidentally, in the Bibliographical Decameron, seems to have started a story that nearly the whole impression of the book was shipped to the Ottoman Court.” Abbey is dubious about this contemporaneous report of the delivery to the Ottoman palace, but their existence in the Topkapı Palace archives confirms the report is at least partly accurate. See John Roland Abbey, Travel in Aquatint and Lithography 1770–​1860 from the Library of J. R. Abbey (Folkestone and London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1972), 2:325. 28. In the album an entire page was given to the following inscription: “To the Prince Regent, this work is respectfully inscribed, by His Royal Highness’s most faithful and devoted subject and servant, John Young”; Young, Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . , dedication page. 29. In his preface Young indicates that he wrote the biographical accounts drawing on “the historians of Turkey” and for the last five sultans augmented this with “some private information relative to the recent events which have taken place in the Turkish Empire, from persons who were actual witnesses of them, and whose authority, were I permitted so to do, I should be proud to cite in a more explicit manner.” Young, Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey . . . , 3. 30. Ibid., 117. 31. Ibid., 126. 32. Tercüman-ı Ahval, December 18, 1862. See Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople: Pioneers, Studios and Artists from 19th-century Istanbul (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2003), 1:183–​85. 33. The Abdullah Frères were appointed as the official photographers to the Ottoman palace in 1863. 34. As the studio was to find out in later years when their appointment was withdrawn. For an account of the events leading up to this fall in status, see Öztuncay, Photographers of Constantinople, 1:219–​21. 35. The literature on this issue is vast; here I cite just three. For an argument about holography as a border metaphor, see D. Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxviii–​xxxi. For an analysis of translation theory in relation to Turkish and German modernist architecture, see Esra Akcan, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Ethics in Architecture: Bruno Taut’s Translations Out of Germany,” New German Critique 33, no. 3, 99 (Fall 2006): 7–​39, and Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

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36. The term “connected world of empires” is coined by C. A. Bayly and L. T. Fawaz, eds., Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1890–​1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1. See also Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–​1914 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

2 . T H E B AT T L E F I E L D O F O T T O M A N H I S T O R Y

1. “These sketches,” the Polish caption declares, “were drawn by Sultan Abdul Azis for the court painter St. Chlebowski.” 2. For an analysis of the fraught pathway to Sultan Abdülaziz’s first portrait commission, see Engin Özendes, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Fotoğrafçılık, 1839–​1919 / Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–​1919, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1995), 225; Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople: Pioneers, Studios and Artists from 19thcentury Istanbul, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2003), 1:185; and Mary Roberts, “The Limits of Circumscription,” in Photography’s Orientalism, New Essays on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 53–​74. 3. Mary Roberts, “Ottoman Statecraft and the ‘Pencil of Nature’: Photography, Painting, and Drawing at the Court of Sultan Abdülaziz,” Ars Orientalis 43 (2013): 10–​30. 4. Gazeta Warszawska, 1865, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–​04: 21. 5. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sketchbook, 1864, Constantinople, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005: 1–​21, National Museum in Warsaw. 6. The three documents are: Chlebowski, handwritten announcement about the exhibition, undated, Przyb.236–​04: 17; a newspaper article, Journal de Constantinople, 29 March 1865, Przyb.236–​04: 19; and an article in the Gazeta Warszawska, 1865, Przyb.236–​04: 21, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library. 7. Gazeta Warszawska, 1865, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–​04: 21. 8. The named individuals in these portraits include: Said Efendi, page 13; Saib Bey Efendi, page 14; Osman Paşa, page 15; Mahmud Paşa (on the left), Mahmud Paşa (on the right), page 16; and Halil Paşa, page 17. A second lineup with seven names is on page 11 of the sketchbook. Although a few names, such as Muzafer, Rasim, and Rauf, are legible (Rasim Paşa and Rauf Bey, adjutants to the sultan, are listed on the diagram on page 18, but it is not certain if these are the same men), the others are barely legible and cannot be matched to those names mentioned in the three documents. 9. Orhan F. Köprülü, “Fuad Paşa, Keçecizâde,” İslâm Ansiklopedisi Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (1996), 13:203. 10. For an account of Fuad Paşa’s distinguished career, see “Fuad Paşa, Keçecizâde,” İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 202–​5, and Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, “The Men of the Tanzimat,” History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–​1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 61–​69. 11. The magnificence of the sultan’s tent, its symbolic red roof and the sumptuously embroidered interior which housed the sultan’s seat, is carefully delineated in the watercolor sketch on page 6 of the Warsaw sketchbook. The other tents within the encampment

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are also evident on this page. The inclusion of this grand tent evokes the Ottoman tradition where such magnificent tents were utilized when the sultans traveled to the field of action. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sketchbook, 1864, Constantinople, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005: 6, National Museum in Warsaw. 12. The sketch of the elaborate ceremonial horse decoration on page 21 could be a study for the sultan’s horse. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sketchbook, 1864, Constantinople, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005: 21, National Museum in Warsaw. 13. Page 1 of the sketchbook contains a larger study of this drummer’s head. On the back of page 12 a composite of drawings reiterates some of these figures in different poses. On pages 19 and 20 sketches of pack mules laden with field artillery are likely also to be studies for this second painting. Stanisław Chlebowski, Sketchbook, 1864, Constantinople, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 13005, National Museum in Warsaw. 14. The topography of this sketch, with a figure on horseback on the crest of a hill that slopes down to the waterway, accords with this description. Journal de Constantinople, 29 March 1865, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–​04: 19 and Gazeta Warszawska, 1865, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–​04: 21. 15. According to the Gazeta Warszawska the horse maneuvers (such as those seen on pages 10, 11, and 12) particularly preoccupied Chlebowski when he was sketching at the camp. The paper informs its readers that horses presented a particular challenge for the artist who until that time had been primarily preoccupied with historical genre paintings. Gazeta Warszawska, 1865, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–​04: 21. 16. Tercüman-ı Ahval (Istanbul), 27 Zilkade 1281 (Sunday, April 23, 1865), No. 633. Quoted in Mustafa Cezar, “The Architectural Decoration of Dolmabahçe and Beylerbeyi Palaces,” National Palaces 4 (1992): 29. 17. Abdülaziz was particularly committed to modernizing the armed forces by increasing funding and purchasing the latest equipment, including rifles from Prussia and largecaliber cannons from Germany. See Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 86. 18. Alfred de Caston recorded a conversation with Serkis Balyan in his article “Le Grand mouvement architectural dans l’Empire Ottoman,” Revue de Constantinople, March 7, 1875, 416–​18. For an analysis of the sultan’s involvement in architectural design, see Ahmet A. Ersoy, “On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’: Architectural Revival and Its Discourse during the Abdülaziz Era (1861–​76)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000), 369–​76. For an analysis of ceiling paintings in Istanbul, see Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, Günsel Renda, and Zeren Tanındı, “From Walls to Canvases,” in Ottoman Painting (Istanbul: Banks Association of Turkey, 2010), 300–​11. 19. The Gate of Felicity (a reference to the sultan’s abode in the next courtyard) marked the boundary between the inner and outer palace. For the political resonances of this liminal space and the performative uses of the location by successive sultans, see Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 88–​90. 20. The Topkapı Palace Museum holds a full-length portrait of Sultan Abdülaziz, 1867 (TSM17/104) and a bust length portrait, 1866 (TSM 17/968) by Chlebowski. In Chlebow­ ski’s papers is an invoice dated September 1872 from the artist to the palace; it lists a “Por-

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trait of his Majesty the Sultan executed in miniature on ivory for His Excellency Grand Vezier, Mahmoud Pasha 200 liras,” Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–​ 04: 26. (This is likely to be Mahmud Nedim Paşa, Grand Vezier from September 8, 1871 to July 31, 1872.) Documents in the Polish archives reveal that Chlebowski presented the sultan’s miniature portraits to foreign royal houses and heads of state via their embassies in Istanbul. In return he was awarded medals and orders from Spain (1871), Belgium (1872), Germany (1873), and Italy (1874). This was one way in which Chlebowski leveraged his status as painter to the Ottoman court internationally. Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.233–​04: 1–​14. 21. The Times, July 20, 1867, 8. 22. In his articles Taner Timur provides a thorough account of the gap between these ideals expressed through such diplomatic rhetoric and the political and economic realities of this visit. See Taner Timur, “Sultan Abdülâziz’in Avrupa Seyahati—​I,” Tarih ve Toplum (November 1984): 42–​48, and Taner Timur, “Sultan Abdülâziz’in Avrupa Seyahati—​II,” Tarih ve Toplum (December 1984): 16–​25. 23. Salahéddin Bey, La Turquie à L’Exposition Universelle de 1867 (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1867), 144. As Ahmet Ersoy has revealed, Salahéddin Bey wrote the preface and Marie de Launay wrote the majority of the text of this catalogue. Ersoy, “Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’,” 164. The Ottoman fine arts section included portraits of Sultan Abdülaziz by Mary Walker and Ahmet Ali Efendi. The Abdullah Fréres photograph was used for Maria Chenu’s portrait of the sultan published in the special issue on the exposition, “Les visites souveraines: Le Sultan Abdul-Azis,” L’Exposition Universelle de 1867 Illustrée Publication Internationale Autorisée par la Commission impériale, July 11, 1867, 305. 24. The Times, July 3, 1867, 9. 25. “Sultan’s Medal Report Special Reception Committee, Presented 8th December 1870,” Archives of the Corporation of London Records Office: COL/SJ/19/02/009  1867. The Guildhall reception was extensively reported: “The Sultan in England,” Illustrated London News, July 20, 1867, 54; “Reception of the Sultan at Guildhall,” Illustrated London News, July 27, 1867, 88, 89, and 102 (illustrations); “The Visit of the Sultan to the City,” The Times, July 18, 1867, 12; “Visit of the Sultan to the City,” The Times, July 19, 1867, 9; and “Londres—​Réception du Sultan par le lord-maire, à Guildhall,” L’Illustration, July 27, 1867, 52 (illustration), 54. 26. The Times, July 13, 1867. 27. George Housman Thomas, The Investiture of Sultan Abdülaziz I with the Order of the Garter, 17 July 1867, pencil, watercolor, and bodycolor, Royal Collection Trust, Inv. No. 450804. The event was recounted in the Illustrated London News, 20 July, 1867, 59. A painting by Évremond de Bérard celebrating the first ceremony honoring the sultan on his royal tour to Western Europe, an official event conducted by the French at the Port of Toulon, is held in the Naval Museum in Istanbul. 28. The Times, July 17, 1867. The tone is evident in these select refrains from the ode, which was published in full in the London newspaper: “Mighty ruler over nations, none may with his power compare, Day and night his constant study that his people well may fare. . . . East and West should join as sisters, side by side their voices raise. Singing on the day of gladness songs of welcome, songs of praise. Then together, all ye nations,

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cry ‘Amen,’ as England prays, ‘Long may Heav’n, O son of Osman, give thee bright and happy days!’ . . . Now to-day the English people see him do their city grace. Hail to thee, Abd’ool-Aziz! All hail, the son of Osman’s race!” Although the British press remarked that the ode was composed for this occasion, Emre Aracı’s research has revealed Arditi originally composed this music for Abdülaziz’s predecessor, Sultan Abdülmecid, when he worked for the ruler in Istanbul, and it was adapted with new lyrics for the later event in London. Emre Aracı, “Ode to a Sultan,” Cornucopia 4, no. 20 (2000): 92. For an account of the Crystal Palace event, see Emre Aracı, “Londra Crystal Palace’ta Abdülaziz Şerefine verilen konser,” Toplumsal Tarih (1998): 29–​33. For an analysis of Sultan Abdülaziz’s musical interests (that even extended to contributing funds to Wagner’s Bayreuth) in relation to the Ottoman sultans’ embrace of Western polyphonic classical music across the nineteenth century, see Emre Aracı, “Giuseppe Donizetti Pasha and the Polyphonic Court Music of the Ottoman Empire,” Court Historian 7 (2002): 135–​43. 29. This was one of four of the sultan’s compositions published by the Italian firm F. Lucca. See Aracı, “Ode to a Sultan,” 90. For recordings, see Emre Aracı, Osmanlı Sarayı’ndan Avrupa Müziği / European Music at the Ottoman Court, London Academy of Ottoman Court Music (Istanbul: Kalan, 2000). For a recording of Arditi’s ode “Inno Turco,” see Emre Aracı, Istanbul’dan Londra’ya 19: Yüzyıl Osmanlı Koral ve Senfonik Müziği, Prague Symphony Orchestra and Prague Philharmonic Choir (Istanbul: Kalan, 2005). 30. The Times, July 20, 1867, 5. 31. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 32. For an analysis of these paintings see Jérôme Delaplanche, Joseph Parrocel (1646–​1704): La nostalgie de l’héroïsme (Paris: Arthena, 2006). For an analysis of the new types of military imagery that emerged in post-revolutionary France, see Susan Locke Siegfried, “Naked History: The Rhetoric of Military Painting in Postrevolutionary France,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (June 1993): 235–​58. 33. “The Departure of the Sultan,” The Times, July 24, 1867, 11. My thanks to curator Malcolm Hay for facilitating my access and discussing Maclise’s paintings and the sultan’s visit to the Houses of Parliament in 1867. On the role of battle painting in the 1847 Westminster competition and the shifting fate of battle painting in Britain across the nineteenth century, see J. W. M. Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art, 1815–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 34. Sultan Abdülaziz’s drawings are held in the following institutions: National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. III-r.a.6.688 and 6.689 and Inv. No. III-r.a.10.296–​10.366; Military Museum, Istanbul Inv. No. 11143. Chlebowski gave one of the sultan’s sketches to Lady Brassey when she visited him in Istanbul in 1874. It is reproduced in Annie Brassey, Sunshine and Storm in the East, Or cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople (London: Longmans, Green, 1880), 113. Chlebowski’s sketches for the sultan’s battle painting series are held in the National Museum in Warsaw, Inv. No. Rys. Pol. 1966, 7769 and 12998. 35. See Klaus Kreiser, “Public Monuments in Turkey and Egypt, 1840–​1916,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 103–​17. 36. Colin Imber, The Crusade of Varna 1443–45 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Stanford Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 1, Empire of the Gazis: The Rise

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and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1:51–​53. 37. Stanisław Chlebowski, Battle of Varna, oil on canvas, National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. II-a-280. The obvious anachronism in some of the weaponry in the sultan’s Varna paintings (the pistol wielded by the Ottoman cavalryman in figure 15) and European costume (the dress of both European cavalrymen is costume from two centuries later) raises the question as to what historical resources were readily available to the artist and his patron. Chlebowski would have studied arms and costumes in the Ottoman Military Museum in Hagia Irene and probably also at the Janissary Costume Museum in Istanbul. Chlebowski’s letter written from Oise in 1881 instructing Preziosi to visit the “Constantinople Arsenal in Istanbul, located in the ancient church of St Irene” demonstrates his intimate knowledge of this museum, whose collections were based on the empire’s spolia from major conflicts in Europe and elsewhere. In this letter Chlebowski provides a very precise description of the whereabouts of the weapons he is requesting Preziosi to sketch for him. “By the church in the courtyard there is a long room where the more common weapons are laid out. When you enter this room on the left, by the windows, there is an enormous number of spears—​among which are to be found several threepronged ones as the drawing shows you, without being accurate as I’ve forgotten their exact shape. Could you please do three or four sketches of them”; Stanisław Chlebowski, Oise, to Amadeo Preziosi, Istanbul, 13 August 1881, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb. Rkp.238_04.T3: 138. For a history of these museum collections in Istanbul, see Wendy Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 45–​ 58. So too we know that Chlebowski owned a copy of the French translation of Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s multivolume Histoire de l’empire Ottoman depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Bellizard, Barthès, Dufour et Lowell, 1835), a seminal historical study for the period. Camille Joufrey to Chlebowski, 20 October 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb. Rkp.238_04.T2: 97. We do not know how early Chlebowski acquired this publication, and thus whether he had it when creating the Varna paintings. Anachronisms such as those found in this painting are also evident in other works in the series. My sincere thanks to the staff of the Military Museum in Istanbul for generously facilitating my access to Chelbowski’s paintings and discussing these matters. Particular thanks to Director Bülent Tütüncüoğlu and curator İlkay Karatepe. 38. In the military museum’s catalogue, İlkay Karatepe notes the stylistic and compositional similarities between their nine unsigned paintings and the two signed by Chlebowski, although the unsigned paintings are listed as “School of Chlebowski.” İlkay Karatepe, Askeri Müze Resim Koleksiyonu (Istanbul: Askeri Müze ve Kültür Sitesi Komutanlığı, 2011), 332–​59. A close study of the sultan’s sketches and calligraphic inscriptions in the Kraków Museum enables me to unequivocally attribute four of them. I do not think, however, the portrait of Abdülaziz in this collection is by the artist, given the lack of proficiency in paint handling and the inaccurate signature “Kleboski” on the work. Comparing it to the sultan’s portrait by Chlebowski in the Topkapı Palace collection confirms this. 39. The two letters attached to one of the albums of the sultan’s drawings certify their authen-

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ticity and recount the working process of the sultan and Chlebowski; National Museum in Kraków, Inv. No. III-r.a.10.296–​10.366. 40. This gridded compositional drawing is spattered with red ink, an intriguing indication of the proximity in which the two were working in the Dolmabahçe Palace studio. 41. A similar energy is evident in Abdülaziz’s other sketches of individual cavalrymen; see, for example, Abdülaziz, No title, ink on paper, National Museum in Kraków: MNK IIIr.a.10318, and Abdülaziz, No title, ink on paper, National Museum in Kraków: MNKIIIr.a.10316. 42. This sketch is similar to the grouping on the right in The Siege of the Fortress of Semendre and the soldiers on the right in The Pitched Battle of Mohaç (fig. 29). The sultan’s sketch could be a study for either of these paintings. 43. Jean-Léon Gérôme to Stanisław Chlebowski, 14 February 1876, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb. Rkp.237–​04.T1: 74. Alberto Pasini wrote to Chlebowski two weeks later indicating that he had seen his painting at Gérôme’s studio and expressing even more explicitly his concern about the sultan’s adverse influence on the Polish artist’s work: “many things in it are more explicit than is necessary. Some time working in Europe (Paris) will suffice to set you back on the path that the forced labor to which you have been condemned for long years by the whim of the Sultan caused you to abandon.” Alberto Pasini to Stanisław Chlebowski, Paris, 25 February 1876, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb. Rkp.238_04.T3: 65. 44. Under palace patronage, Ottoman calligraphy remained a vibrant art form in the nineteenth century. M. Uğur Derman, Masterpieces of Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Museum (Istanbul: Sakıp Sabancı Museum, 2004). 45. A page among the Chlebowski papers shows the Polish artist was experimenting with writing “painter Chlebowski” in Ottoman. The awkward hand of the Ottoman inscription at the top of this page contrasts with the fluency of the inscription at the bottom. (It includes a more formal title of “royal painter” evidently written by another hand.) In the middle of this page Chlebowski’s title as painter to the sultan is written in French and beneath it in Ottoman that has been transcribed into Latin script. Stanisław Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.234–​04: 25. 46. On the word-image relationship in the art of the book see David J. Roxburgh, “The Study of Painting and the Arts of the Book,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 1–​16, and in Persian painting, see David Roxburgh, “Micrographia: Toward a Visual Logic of Persianate Painting,” Res 43 (2003): 11–​30. 47. See The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, ed. Selmin Kangal, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2000). 48. Emine Fetvacı, “In the Image of a Military Ruler,” in Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 191–​237, and “Images of Wars and Warriors: Illustrated Gazanames,” in Ottoman Painting, ed. Serpil Bağcı, Filiz Çağman, Günsel Renda, and Zeren Tanındı (Istanbul: Banks Association of Turkey, 2010), 166–​77. 49. See Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, “Introduction,” in Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden: Brill, 2000), xv. 50. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1, Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–​1808, 185.

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51. During the time the sultan was working on his battle series, the most significant of these new accounts was Ahmed Vefik Paşa’s Ottoman history school textbook, Fezleke-i ta’rih-i osmanî. This is an account from the empire’s origins through its expansion and decline, concluding with an optimistic perspective on Sultan Abdülaziz’s reign. (The conclusion was extended and modified to incorporate Sultan Abdülhamid II’s reign in a later reprint of the volume.) For an analysis of the shifts in writing Ottoman history in this period, see Christoph K. Neumann, “Bad Times and Better Self: Definitions of Identity and Strategies for Development in Late Ottoman Historiography (1850–​1900),” in The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography, ed. Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 57–​78, and Ercüment Kuran, “Ottoman Historiography of the Tanzimat Period,” in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 422–​29. For an analysis of earlier Ottoman approaches to history writing, see the essays by Halil İnalcık and V. L. Ménage in the same book. 52. It is likely that these oil sketches (figures 18 and 44) were created for works for the sultan, but they are not firmly attributed because the finished paintings (if they were ever created) remain unlocated. 53. Kangal, Sultan’s Portrait, 522–​23, and Funda Berksoy, “Political Rationality and Art during the Reign of Sultan Abdülaziz: Stanisław Chlebowski’s Portrait of ‘The Ottoman Sultans’ ,” paper presented at Middle Eastern Studies Association Conference, Washington DC, December 1–​4, 2011. 54. It is not known if the group portraits were still hanging on the walls of the Beylerbeyi Palace in 1869, and there is no record as to where the battle paintings were hung in the palaces in this period. 55. This photograph is reproduced in Bahattin Öztuncay, Hâtıra-i Uhuvvet: Portre fotoğrafların Cazibesi: 1846–​1950 (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2005), 125. 56. On Chlebowski’s relationship with Gérôme, see Agata Wójcik, “Jean-Léon Gérôme and Stanisław Chlebowski: The Story of a Friendship,” RIHA Journal 14 (December 2010). A contributing factor to Chlebowski’s decision to leave Istanbul was the fact that he had just resolved a long-standing dispute with the palace over payment for his work. The invoices and related correspondence in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, and the artists’ papers in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków indicate a protracted process of extracting final payment from the palace that was not resolved until 1875, three years after the commission concluded. In a letter to Mr. Onou, the first Dragoman to the Russian Ambassador, written on November 11, 1875, Chlebowski notes that today he has finalized his claim with the Ministry of Finance. He expresses regrets about the impact this matter has had on his financial and professional circumstances, suggesting that perhaps he should have renounced his claims three years ago. Chlebowski to Onou, 11 November 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb. Rkp.238–​04.T3: 199. A letter from Chlebowski to the Minister of Finances noting final payment of fifteen hundred Turkish livres and renouncing all other claims is dated 17 / 29 September 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb.238_04.T3: 201. There is another similar letter dated 7 September 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.234–​04: 16. An invoice addressed to the sultan dated September 1872 lists a range of paintings that he has made

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for the palace; Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–​04: 26. The palace correspondence with Chlebowski regarding these painting commissions is held in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, İ HR 00268 016125. 57. For a range of Chlebowski’s later paintings, see War and Peace: Ottoman-Polish Relations in the 15th–​19th Centuries, ed. Selmin Kangal, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, 1999), 416–​34, and Orientalizm w malarstwie rysunku i grafice w Polsce w XIX i 1. Połowie XX wieku, ed. Anna Kozak and Tadeusz Majda, exh. cat. (Warsaw: National Museum in Warsaw, 2008), 117–​33. 58. In this period Kraków became an important center for the Polish art world. Jan Matejko, a leading figure in the Kraków art scene, like Chlebowski, contributed to the efflorescence of Polish history painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was an intense period for nationalist sentiment expressed through heroic scenes from Polish history. Although living abroad for substantial periods of his career, Chlebowski was aware of these developments within Poland. In Istanbul he also kept abreast of Polish work shown at the Paris Salon. In 1874, for example, his friend the Italian artist Alberto Pasini wrote to him about Matejko’s painting of Stefan Batory, King of Poland before Pskov at that year’s Salon. Pasini to Chlebowski, 8 May 1874, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian library, Przb. Rkp.238_04.T3: 62. 59. Although the Ottomans did not take the Habsburg capital during the first siege, the encounter left the Habsburg forces in disarray and unable to launch a counterattack, thus enabling the Ottomans to secure their buffer territory in Hungary and shore up the vassal relationship with Zapolya in Transylvania. For an account of the significance of the first siege of Vienna in relation to Sultan Süleyman’s military and political career, see Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 1:93. 60. For an analysis of the range of prototypes for representing Sultan Süleyman during his lifetime and posthumously including the “last influential prototype” of Süleyman in old age created first by Melchior Lorichs, see Jürg Meyer zur Capellen and Serpil Bağcı, “The Age of Magnificence,” in Kangal, Sultan’s Portrait, 96–​133. 61. For an account of the origins, traditions, and evolving costume of the Polish hussars see Richard Brzezinski, Polish Winged Hussar, 1576–​1775 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006). The Polish hussars continued to use lances for at least a century after other European armies had abandoned them around 1600. While their distinctive hollow lances proved ineffective against the superior weapons of European armies during this period, they had some successes with this weaponry in their battles with Ottoman and Russian horsemen (ibid., 54). 62. Sobieski’s triumph at the second siege of Vienna, where Poland played a lead role in “rescuing” Christian Europe from the Ottoman threat, was a popular subject for Polish artists such as Jan Matejko, who painted King Jan III Sobieski Presenting Canon Denhoff with a Letter to the Pope with the News about the Victory over the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 in 1880. Matejko also painted the Battle of Varna. 63. The political activity of the Polish exiles in Paris was focused around the Hôtel Lambert and Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. They had strong connections to the Poles in the Ottoman capital such as Sadık Paşa and they viewed Istanbul as the center of Polish activities in the East. The village of Adampol/Adamköy (now Polonezköy) was established to support these aspirations; see articles by Kazimierz Dopierała and Hieronim ­Kaczmarek

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in Kangal, War and Peace, 81–​92. See also Akgün Akova’s poetic and nostalgic celebration of the social history of Polonezköy; Akgün Akova, The Eagle under the Crescent and the Star Polonezköy (Istanbul: Akgün Akova, Istanbul 2010). 64. Two letters authenticating the sketches are attached to this album, MNK III r.a. 10296– 10366. The first is signed “Muzaffer, Maréchal, Aide de camp. d. S.M. le Sultan, Gouverneur Général du Liban” and dated February 8, 1904; he certified that Chlebowski worked “under the direction and the inspiration of the Sultan” in the palace studio. The second, dated 1904, is signed by Professor Marian Sokołowski, director of the Czartoryski Museum, who visited Chlebowski’s studio in Pera. Both were in Istanbul during the time that Chlebowski worked for the Sultan. 65. The sultan’s sketches were published in the following: Annie Brassey published the sultan’s sketch that she had been given by Chlebowski in 1874 in her travelogue Sunshine and Storm in the East, 113; for an analysis of Brassey’s travels in the Middle East, see Nancy Micklewright, A Victorian Traveler in the Middle East: The Photography and Travel Writing of Annie Lady Brassey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Mieczysław Treter, “Rysunki Sułtana Abdul-Azisa,” Lamus 4 (1908–​9): 555–​63; Michał Pawlikowski, “Studio Talk: Cracow,” The Studio 57 (1913): 162–​63; and M. Sami, “Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi 14 (Mart 1, 1330 / March 1, 1914), reprinted in Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemi­ yeti Gazetesi, 1911–​1914, ed. Yaprak Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2007), 185–​86. For a full list of the sketches in the Kraków collection, see Kangal, War and Peace, 431–​34. For related works by Chlebowski held in Polish collections, see Kozak and Majda, Orientalizm w malarstwie rysunku, 117–​33, 278–​87. 66. Sami, “Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim.” For an analysis of this journal published by the Society of Ottoman Artists between 1911 and 1914, see Wendy M. K. Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 116–​19. 3. G É R Ô M E I N I S TA N B U L

Epigraph: Jean-Léon Gérôme to Osman Hamdy Bey, 12 January 1875, Paris. Collection of Edhem Eldem. 1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 2. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenthcentury Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–​59. 3. In note 7 of her essay “Imaginary Orient” (ibid., 57–​58), Linda Nochlin reported a conversation with Edward Said in which he said that “most of the so-called writing on the back wall of the Snake Charmer is in fact unreadable,” to refute Richard Ettinghausen’s statement that the various inscriptions in Arabic “can be easily read”; Richard Ettinghausen, “Jean-Léon Gérôme as a Painter of Near Eastern Life,” in Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–​1904), ed. Bruce H. Evans, exh. cat. (Dayton, OH: Dayton Art Institute, 1972), 18. Walter Denny weighed in to the discussion by identifying the lower panels as being, in Gérôme’s time, from the Altın Yol (1574) and the upper panel from the Baghdad Kiosk (1637); Walter B. Denny, “Quotations In and Out of Context: Ottoman Turkish Art and European Orientalist Painting,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 221. Adding a further complication to the identifica-

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tion, Barry Flood (in correspondence with Sarah Lees, curator at the Clark Art Institute) has identified the long inscription at the top as an amalgamation of two sources—​one of which is a verse from the Qur’an (2:256)—​and he proposes the following about the differing interpretations: “Ettinghausen claimed . . . that the inscriptions were legible, Edward Said denied this. The truth lies somewhere in between and is more interesting—​ the inscriptions have been deformed / transformed through copying, and Gérôme’s combination of disparate sources also complicates any sense of ‘simple’ reading” (Finbarr Barry Flood to Sarah Lees, email correspondence, transcript in file notes on The Snake Charmer, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA). 4. “M. Gérôme, the distinguished French historical painter, has, we understand, received a special invitation from the Sultan to paint a series of pictures for the Palace, and is expected to arrive here towards the middle of the present month.” Levant Herald, May 1, 1875, 330. A shorter notice in French appears on page 331 of the same paper. 5. Levant Herald, May 7, 1875, 346. 6. “Every few days I am making announcements in the newspapers about his arrival, to make sure the whole of Istanbul knows he is coming. As the local public are as dull as anything, I am preparing an article for the newspaper and listing all his major works.” Stanisław Chlebowski to his mother and sisters Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 3 May 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 258. 7. “Le Peintre Gérôme,” Levant Herald, May 11, 1875, 359. A slightly extended version of the same article was published the following day under the same title; Levant Herald, May 12, 1875, 158–​59. 8. His arrival on the Messageries Maritimes vessel La Bourdonnais was announced in a short entry in La Turquie, May 15, 1875, 1. 9. Again the newspaper is highly conscious of art-world events in the French capital, noting that “Despite the crises that have occurred, Paris has once again become, with remarkable speed, the great centre of the arts,” where the “English and particularly the Americans come and pay amazing prices for canvases by Gérôme, Baudry, and Meissonier”; “Le Peintre Gérôme,” Levant Herald, May 28, 1875, 403. 10. Levant Herald (June 2, 1875, 189) reports his departure for Bursa and his return to Istanbul (June 17, 1875, 458). This same trip to Bursa is again reported (June 23, 1875, 219). 11. Levant Herald, June 17, 1875, 458. A version of the same report is published in French on page 459. 12. On June 26 Chlebowski writes: “I painted so much that I have had to stay in bed for three days now . . . I am really upset, because Gérôme has left for Istanbul to paint another study, while I have to stay at home. A few days ago, we came back from a three-day trip to Adrianople, where we spent all the time painting studies, regardless of the searing heat.” Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 26 June 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 264. 13. Levant Herald, June 17, 1875, 458. 14. Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 16 May 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 261. It is clear from this letter that Chlebowski does not know Gérôme very well before this visit and that he holds him in awe, referring to him as “one of the greatest painters in the world.” In a later letter he notes the

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significance of this contact with Gérôme: “His arrival has become so fortunate for me and a real milestone in my life; I have made many decisions about my future, which will turn out very positively for both you and me.” Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 26 June 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 265. Chlebowski is referring to his decision to return to Paris, and the comment is prescient given how important the connection would prove for both artists, who continued to exchange sketches, artifacts, and advice. Gérôme was also instrumental in introducing Chlebowski to his brother-in-law Albert Goupil. 15. Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 27 May 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 263. 16. Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 26 June 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 265. Two weeks after Gérôme and Buttura left Istanbul, Chlebowski wrote of the benefits of the visits and the arduousness of their work regime: “I have benefitted enormously from Gérôme’s visit much more than I could ever expect. It will turn out to be a real epoch in my artistic life and my material position . . . . I may have exhausted myself too much, because having my guests for one and a half months I had to get up every day at four in the morning, arrange everything, and at six be in Istanbul, where we usually painted our studies. Hot . . . summers are horrible, and when I painted in the streets, often in full sunlight until late evening, I was so tired, that I was coming back home drunk from exhaustion.” Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 12 July 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 266. 17. Opinions differ as to which artist hosted Gérôme’s 1875 visit. The Goncourt Journal recounts a dinner-party conversation with the artist on the eve of his trip that year. In this source it is indicated that Gérôme will be hosted by an (unnamed) court painter who had painted the sultan’s portrait. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1875–​1878 (Paris: L’imprimerie nationale de Monaco, 1956), 11:16. Vasıf Kortun disputed Gerald M. Ackerman and Semra Germaner’s assumption that it was “Abdullah Siriez” (a misnomer for the Abdullah Frères) and contended instead that it was Pierre Désire Guillemet; Vasıf K. Kortun, “Gérôme ve İstanbul’daki Dostları,” Tarih ve Toplum (August 1988): 40–​41. Both Guillemet and Chlebowski were court painters to Sultan Abdülaziz and portraits were commissioned from both of them, so either could fit the description. But a letter from Chlebowski to his family unequivocally establishes that he hosted Gérôme and is thus the unnamed painter referred to in the Journal: “I have had guests for two days now: Gérôme arrived with his companion, Mr. Buttura, who is also a painter. . . . Gérôme sleeps in my bedroom. His friend sleeps in Milowicz’s rooms, Milowicz is in the dining room, while I have one pillow and two sheets and roam with them around my house; I sleep wherever I can find a place or a sofa; mostly in the atelier or in the living room.” Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 16 May 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 261. 18. Some months after his return to Paris, in a letter to Chlebowski, Gérôme mentions having had lunch at Ahmed Vefik’s home in Istanbul. Admiring the napkins on Ahmed Vefik’s table, he requests that Chlebowski commission some for him: “You remember those gold borders with inscriptions from the Koran”; Gérôme to Chlebowksi, 19 Octo-

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ber 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.237_04 T1: 87. The following month Gérôme writes: “When you see Vefik Effendi, be good enough to pay him all my compliments; and add that I will never forget the very cordial welcome he gave me and I would be most happy to do the same for him in Paris—​minus the napkins”; Gérôme to Chlebowksi, 2 November 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb.237_04 T1: 88. In the earlier letter Gérôme mentions having recently received a letter from Osman Hamdi Bey, noting: “I believe he’s in a difficult situation: his father is nothing now and he’s nothing much either . . . he will, however, find a way to turn things around”; Gérôme to Chlebowksi, 19 October 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.237_04 T1: 87. Osman Hamdi Bey’s familiarity with Gérôme prior to this visit is evident in Gérôme’s letter on January 12 declining an invitation to stay with Osman Hamdi because he had already agreed to stay with Chlebowski. Gérôme writes: “whether I stay here or there is a small matter: the main thing and the most pleasant will be to meet you now and again”; Gérôme to Osman Hamdy, 12 January 1875, collection of Edhem Eldem, Istanbul. Other letters in the same collection show that Gérôme continued to correspond intermittently with Osman Hamdi Bey in the decades ahead, referring students to each other and discussing matters such as the Alexander Sarcophagus, which Gérôme was particularly interested in because of his sculptural experiments with polychromy. 19. French architect Léon Parvillée was employed for this restoration project and Ahmed Vefik was instrumental in revitalizing the Ottoman ceramics industry for this purpose. See Ahmet A. Ersoy, “On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’: Architectural Revival and Its Discourse during the Abdülaziz Era (1861–​76)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000); Beatrice St. Laurent, “Ottomanization and Modernization: The Architectural and Urban Redevelopment of Bursa and the Genesis of Tradition, 1839–​1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1989). 20. It may well have been Chlebowski who introduced Gérôme to the Abdullah Frères, as he seems to have instigated the photographic portrait at their studio. He writes: “We have had photographs taken of Gérôme; I am going to send you two copies—​one to be hung at Mother’s place, the other one at the Bieszkos’ ”; Chlebowski to Kamila, Ksawera, and Helena, 26 June 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Rkp.BJ Przyb.241–​04 T.2: 265. 21. Levant Herald, November 9, 1877, 846. 22. This painting is number 178 in the French edition of Gerald M. Ackerman’s Jean-Léon Gérôme: Monographie révisée, catalogue raisonné mis à jour (Courbevoie: ACR Edition Internationale, 2000), 268. 23. Abdullah Frères to Gérôme, 14 November 1877, Masson Collection, Paris. My thanks to Gerald Ackerman for assistance in tracking down this letter and to Edouard Papet at the Musée d’Orsay for providing access to a copy of it. 24. I am grateful to Cemal Öztaş, M. Erdal Eren, and Gülsen Sevinç Kaya for facilitating my access to study and photograph these documents and the paintings in the Dolmabahçe Palace Archive and Museum in 2004. 25. “Please be good enough, dear Monsieur, to give me some confidential information about Edouard Cey, secretary and friend to Hamdy Bey. I have had occasion to see him in Vienna . . . recently he wrote to me to ask me to send him some paintings in order to show

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them to the Sultan, so we made him a fairly bulky parcel and if the opportunity should arise and you can enlighten me as to this affair and as to the Sultan’s desires, I would be infinitely obliged to you”; Albert Goupil to Chlebowski, 22 May 1874, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.238_04 T2: 8. In a subsequent letter from Cannes Albert Goupil writes: “I thank you for the information you provide concerning E. Cey and the palace; I think he has succeeded in selling two paintings; but as he is sending his letters to Paris, I am not exactly sure what stage the transaction has reached”; Albert Goupil to Chlebowski, 29 March 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.238_04 T2: 10. A money order in the National Palaces Archives (Milli Saraylar Arşivi), Istanbul, dated March 21, 1875, confirms that a payment had been made by the palace by this stage (Document 1–​1387). 26. Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, ed. Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu and İlona Baytar, exh. cat. (Istanbul, 2008). 27. Goupil et Cie Invoice, 26 November 1875. The invoices and telegrams are Document 1–​1393; payments through Credit Lyonnais are Document 1–​1387; receipts for shipment are Document 1–​1389; National Palaces Archives, Istanbul. 28. This correspondence even includes some works that Goupil sought to acquire at auction on behalf of the sultan but failed to obtain at a suitable price, such as the Florentine Poet (1861), most likely the painting of the poet Dante by Alexandre Cabanel. Telegramme Goupil to Ahmed Aly Bey, 28 April (no year) 1–1393, National Palaces Archives, Istanbul. 29. Gérôme to Chlebowski, 19 October 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb.237_04 T1: 85. 30. Ibid., 85–​86. Gérôme’s letter to Chlebowski reveals his good opinion of Ahmet Ali Bey: “All the paintings were addressed to Ahmed, of whose probity I am sure, which is why we did not abuse your good will as it was pointless putting you to any inconvenience since we had on hand a serious man on whom we could, and we had to, count.” This letter reveals Gérôme’s suspicion about “the set that surrounds the Sovereign” whom he refers to as “Messieurs X, Y, Z.” His suspicions were derived from Chlebowski’s dealings with these palace bureaucrats, which by this stage had devolved into a complicated struggle to extract final payment for his palace commission. Although Chlebowski’s role as a palace painter had concluded in 1872, he did not resolve the matter of final payment for this work until 1875. 31. In his 1962 publication, Ayhan Dürrüoğlu refers to correspondence between Şeker Ahmed Paşa and Gérôme in the possession of Asiye Hanımefendi, Şeker Ahmed’s daughter-in-law in Istanbul; Ayhan Dürrüoğlu, Şeker Ahmet Paşa (Ankara: Eroğlu Matbaası, 1962), 7. As Ahmet Kamil Gören has noted, unfortunately these letters remain untraced. However, this mention of their existence suggests that the two men did stay in contact with one another. Ahmet Kamil Gören, “(Şeker) Ahmed Ali Paşa’yı Yazmak (1841–​1907),” in Şerifoğlu and Baytar, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, 36. 32. For a summary of these debates around Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s work, including a reprint of key Turkish writings, see the important survey exhibition: Şerifoğlu and Baytar, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907. 33. Gören, “(Şeker) Ahmed Ali Paşa’yı Yazmak (1841–​1907),” 51. 34. Samuel Cox notes that the following paintings hung in Abdülhamid’s audience room:

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Aivazovsky’s moonlight view of Seraglio Point, Ghickson’s painting of Küçüksu Palace, and three other paintings—​“The best of these represents the midnight Sun in Norway. The other two are naval engagements.” (In all likelihood Cox is referring to Wahlberg’s An August Night in a Swedish Port.) Cox also notes that in the large hall on the second floor there were four life-sized portraits of Abdülhamid’s predecessors Abdülaziz, Abülmecid, Mahmud II, and Selim III and in the stairwell a painting by Georges Washington; Samuel S. Cox, Diversions of a Diplomat in Turkey (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1887), 19. For an analysis of this and other accounts of the paintings hung in the palace as recounted by nineteenth-century European travelers, see Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists (Istanbul: İşbank, 2002), 117–​19. 35. Sema Öner, “The Role of the Ottoman Palace in the Development of Turkish Painting Following the Reforms of 1839,” National Palaces 4 (1992): 58–​77; and Gülsen Sevinç Kaya, “Dolmabahçe Sarayı İçin Goupil Galerisi’nden Alınan Resimler / The Paintings Purchased from Goupil’s Art Gallery for Dolmabahçe Palace,” in Osmanlı Sarayı’nda Oryantalistler / Orientalists at the Ottoman Palace (Istanbul: TBMM Milli Saraylar, 2006), 71–​91. 36. Levant Herald, April 8, 1875, 266. 37. Gérôme to Chlebowski, 29 October 1875, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przb. Rkp.237_04: 86. 38. Goupil et Cie / Boussod, Valadon et Cie Stock Books [electronic resource], 1846–​1919, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; and I-1387, receipts for payment to Goupil through Credit Lyonnais; I-1389, transportation receipts from Messageries Maritimes; I-1393, invoices for paintings from Goupil et Cie, and telegrams related to this purchase of paintings, National Palaces Archives, Istanbul. 39. Eugène Montrosier, Les artistes modernes (Paris: Librairie Artistique, 1881), 1:9–​12, 21–​24, 113–​16. 40. For an account of the Goupil firm’s approach to reductions and repetitions see Hélène Lafont-Couturier, “La maison Goupil ou la notion d’œuvre originale remise en question,” Revue de L’Art 112 (1996): 59–​69. On the firm’s approach to the reproduction of Gérôme’s art see Hélène Lafont-Couturier, “Mr. Gérôme works for Goupil,” in Gérôme and Goupil: Art and Enterprise, ed. Hélène Lafont-Couturier, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000), 13–​29. 41. The purchase and sale are listed in Goupil Stockbook 9, page 97, row 15, and Goupil Stockbook 10, page 29, row 14, Getty Research Institute. A second reduction of the painting was in Boulanger’s studio at the time of his death; La Gynécée (Réduction), Vente après décès de Gustave Boulanger, auc. cat. (Paris: Hotel Drouot, 14–​16 Mars, 1889), cat. no. 6, 13. 42. The sultan’s version was sold by Goupil on January 27, 1876; Goupil et Cie invoice, Document No. 1393, National Palaces Archives, and Goupil Stockbook 7, page 93, row 5, and Goupil Stockbook 8, page 33, row 12, Getty Research Institute. 43. A half-size copy of Cot’s Printemps was sold in November 1873, another version of the painting was sold in May 1879, and in July 1882 yet another was sold through Knoedler in New York. The earliest painting by this title is listed in the Goupil stockbooks as being sold to M. Derby in New York in August 1870, but it is not clear if this was the same painting as that shown in the Salon of 1873 and much copied. On Cot’s work see James

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Henry Rubin, “Pierre-Auguste Cot’s The Storm,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 14 (1979): 191–​200. 44. For analysis of Goupil’s other international networks see Anne Helmreich, “The Global: Goupil & Cie / Boussod, Valadon & Cie and International Networks,” Nineteenth-century Art Worldwide 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2012), and Agnès Penot, “The Goupil & Cie Stock Books: A Lesson on Gaining Prosperity through Networking,” Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 177–​82. 45. Michèle Haddad, Khalil-Bey: Un homme, une collection (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 2000). 46. As Haskell demonstrates, Halil Bey’s reception in the popular press in Paris often reiterated superficial stereotypes of the “Turk” as a spendthrift and philanderer; Francis Haskell, “A Turk and His Pictures in Nineteenth-century Paris,” in Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 175–​85. For an account of the role of Halil Şerif as an Ottoman statesman and advocate for political reform, see Roderic H. Davison, “Halil Şerif Paşa: The Influence of Paris and the West on an Ottoman Diplomat,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları 6 (1986): 47–​65; Roderic H. Davison, “Halil Şerif Paşa, Ottoman Diplomat and Statesman,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları 2 (1981): 203–​21. 47. The painting is now held in the Presidential Palace in Ankara. A print of the work was issued by the Goupil firm before they sold it to the sultan; Giuseppe de Nittis, La Place de la Concorde, from L’Illustration, June 12, 1875, 380. The work was reprinted in the year of the artist’s death in Le Monde Illustré, 1884, 133. 48. Goupil et Cie, invoice to “Sa Majesté Impériale le Sultan à Constantinople” for La Place de la Concorde, October 7, 1875, National Palaces Archives, Istanbul. The company’s stock books indicate that the painting was acquired on July 23, 1875, and sold to the sultan in October; Goupil et Cie / Boussod, Valadon et Cie Stockbook 8, page 106. Getty Research Institute Special Collections. 49. Throughout this period of immense social upheaval the space was symbolically reinterpreted through official and unofficial urban ceremony. The number of times it was renamed is indicative of the contested significance of this public site. First named Place Louis XV, it was renamed Place de la Révolution in 1792, then Place de la Concorde in 1795, then back to Place Louis XV in 1814. The name was changed yet again in 1826 to Place Louis XVI and in July 1830 to Place de la Chartre and then back to Place de la Concorde later that year. In 1875, the square had most recently been the focus for nationalist sentiment in the face of France’s humiliating defeat during the Franco-Prussian war. The garlanding of Pradier’s sculpture of Strasbourg was a spontaneous response by the citizens of Paris to this threat to the country’s territories. For an account of the complex political history of the site, see De la place Louis XV à la place de la Concorde, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 1982). Also see Hollis Clayson, “La Place de la Concorde in War and Peace,” in Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–​71) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 329–​42. 50. Hollis Clayson interprets Degas’s painting as a group portrait of Parisian masculine sociability recuperating wartime nostalgia, and thus “an image of the cost to bourgeois and upper-class Parisian masculinity of the end of the war and the resumption of ‘normality’ ”; Clayson, “La Place de la Concorde in War and Peace,” 342. For André Dombrowski the painting’s pictorial fragmentation is an “assessment of the unstable . . . political

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landscape of the early Third Republic” and thus “a test case of the pictorial ambiguities of political reference . . . in Impressionist painting.” Both analyses pivot around the occlusion of the Strasbourg statue by Viscount Lepic’s hat. André Dombrowski, “History, Memory, and Instantaneity in Edgar Degas’s Place de la Concorde,” Art Bulletin 93, no. 2 (June 2011): 197. 51. As Porterfield notes, such political neutrality is evident in the long history of the negotiation between France and Egypt over its relocation to Paris, thus “the obelisk was a product of work done by each post-Revolutionary government.” And as he notes, this French perception of its political neutrality is premised upon “dismissing its imperial role outside Europe”; Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798–​1836 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 25–​27. 52. “The gilt engravings on the pedestal of the obelisk are too garish and take too great a prominence. In reality they are lost in the immensity of the place, but the effect is not sufficiently reduced in proportion with the painting.” Anatole de Montaiglon, “Salon de 1875,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1875): 18. 53. On Muḥammad ‘Alī Pasha’s approach to Egyptian antiquities, including the gift of the obelisk for the Place de la Concorde, see Donald Malcolm Reid, “Muhammad Ali’s Archaeological Diplomacy,” in Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 54–​58. 54. Caroline Igra, “Monuments to Prior Glory: The Foreign Perspective on Post-commune Paris,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 62 (1999): 512–​26. 55. Jules Claretie, “Salon de 1875,” L’art et les artistes français contemporains (Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1876), 327. In his profile of the artist, Claretie characterizes de Nittis as a cosmopolitan chameleon: “He is Parisian in Paris, as he will be a Londoner in London” (ibid., 409). 56. For a listing of the panoramic landscapes and paintings of Istanbul’s key monuments and leisure sites that entered the palace collection in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by artists including Max Friedrich Rabes, Max Schmidt, Théodore Van Rysselberghe, Jean-Baptiste-Étienne Deforcade, and Tristram Ellis, see Milli Saraylar Tablo Koleksiyonu, exh. cat. (İstanbul: TBMM Milli Saraylar Daire Başkanlığı yayınıdır, 2010). For an analysis of a contemporary collection of Istanbul landscapes in one of Istanbul’s major private collections see İstanbul: The City of Dreams: Views of İstanbul and Daily Life in the Ottoman World from the 17th to 20th Century with Selected Works from the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Collection, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2008). 57. Le Figaro, July 1, 1867, 3; “La Cérémonie d’Aujourd’hui,” Le Figaro, July 2, 1867, 1 (in which there is an extended description of the ceremonial route and an announcement about the composition of the cortége). 58. On the importance of public ceremony during Sultan Abdülhamid II’s rule, see Selim Deringil, “‘Long Live the Sultan!’: Symbolism and Power in the Hamidian Regime,” in The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–​1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 16–​43. 59. For a comprehensive account of these transformations see Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 55–​67.

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60. For an analysis of earlier representations of ceremonial events held in the Atmeydanı, see Derin Terzioğlu, “The Imperial Circumcision Festival of 1582: An Interpretation,” Muqarnas 12 (1995): 84–​100, and Hippodrom / Atmeydanı: İstanbul’un Tarih Sahnesi / Hippodrom / Atmeydanı: A Stage for Istanbul’s History, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2010). For a survey of the range of nineteenth-century representations of ceremonies held in the Ottoman capital, see “Ceremonials,” in Germaner and İnankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists, 126–​47. 61. This is written in response to Boulanger’s painting; Jules Claretie, L’art et les artistes français contemporains avec un avant-propos sur le salon de 1876 et un index alphabétique (Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1876), 351. 62. Both the central scroll design with embedded portraits in the center of the back wall in Coomans’s painting and the small painting to the right of it are illustrated in the first volume of Louis Barré, Herculanum et Pompéi: Recueil général des peintures, bronzes, mosaïques, etc . . . (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1870), 1:125–​26, plates 99 and 100. The same wall is also illustrated in François Mazois, Les Ruines de Pompéi . . . (Paris: Didot, 1824–​38) 2: plate 27. The charioteer on the left of this wall in Coomans’s painting is likely to have been derived from one of the wall paintings that Barré attributes to the Pantheon in Pompeii. This is also illustrated in Barré, Herculanum et Pompéi, 1: plate 13. Both Coomans and Boulanger would have been aware of these popular publications and probably also knew William Gell, Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii—​T he Result of Excavations since 1819, 2 vols. (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1824). All of these were very popular sources for artists. Boulanger owned Barré’s eight-volume study, as evident in the catalogue for the artist’s posthumous sale; Vente après décès de Gustave Boulanger, 56. 63. Théodore Véron, Salon de 1875: De l’art et des artistes de mon temps (Poitiers, Paris: Librairie Henri Oudin, 1875), 48; Émile Zola, Salons (Genève: Librairie E. Droz; Paris: Librairie Minard, 1959), 161. 64. “Boulanger Le Gynécée XI,” Salon de 1875 Reproductions des principaux ouvrages accompagnées de sonnets par Adrien Dézamy (Paris: Goupil & Cie, 1876), no. 11. 65. Mary Beard provides a very useful summary of the scholarly literature on the Pompeian economy in The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 327. 66. As Raoul McLaughlin states: “Any well-informed Roman appreciated that Rome only governed a small portion of the earth, and that beyond the eastern frontiers, there existed sophisticated kingdoms that could rival their Empire. Evidence of these distant powers was on display in the markets of their popular urban centres which offered the products of Arabia, Persia, India and the Far East, to keen Roman customers. These eastern kingdoms often sent representatives to the Roman Emperor and their rulers would have, with justification, regarded themselves as equal to their Roman counterparts.” McLaughlin’s book provides an account of these patterns of trade into the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean and beyond; see Raoul McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India and China (London: Continuum, 2010), 3. 67. Boulanger traveled to Algeria in 1845 and again to North Africa in 1856 and 1872. MarieMadeleine Aubrun, “Gustave Boulanger, Peintre ‘éclectique’,” Bulletin de la Société de

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l’histoire de l’art français (1986): 169–​71. Coomans journeyed to Algeria in 1843 and also to Turkey; Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, eds., Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künst­ ler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1907–​1950), 7:355. 68. “The link between Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Egypt—​that is antiquity and the Orient—​ was the assumption that the Campanian cities were remnants of or related to Etruscan civilization. The Etruscans themselves, also an eighteenth-century archeological discovery, were thought to be descendants of the Egyptians. Their civilization, which predated the Roman Empire, was considered as ancient as Greek culture, and therefore as significant and august . . . . Study of the Etruscans seemed to promise the formation of a larger and more inclusive artistic canon, one that corresponded to the actual composition of the antique world rather than modern predilection for the Greeks”; Rachel A. Lindheim, “Re-presenting Sappho: The Classical Tradition in Nineteenth-century French Painting” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2005), 171–​72. 69. Sarah Betzer, “Afterimage of the Eruption: An Archaeology of Chassériau’s Tepidarium (1853),” Art History 33, no. 3 (June 2010): 480. 70. Through analysis of Ottoman archival sources, Edhem Eldem demonstrates that in the early decades of the nineteenth century the Ottoman state handled incursions by European scholars, savants, and profiteers on a case-by-case basis. The Ottoman imperial firmans responding to requests in these decades indicates a politically pragmatic response. The Ottomans recognized the significance of these requests within international political negotiations with Western European powers but at this stage the Ottoman state had little interest in retaining these archaeological artifacts. By mid-century, with the exponential increase in the acquisition of ancient artifacts from Ottoman lands by Western Europeans through licit and illicit means, this attitude shifted. See Edhem Eldem, “From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–​ 1869,” in Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–​1914, ed. Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, exh. cat. (Istanbul: SALT / Garanti Kültür A. Ş, 2011), 281–​329. 71. Ussama Makdisi, “The ‘Rediscovery’ of Baalbek: A Metaphor for Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” in Bahrani, Çelik, and Eldem, Scramble for the Past, 272. 72. Eldem, “Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern,” 315. In this essay Eldem provides the first analysis of the 1869 legislation and the events leading up to its drafting. 73. Albert de la Fizelière, Memento du Salon de Peinture de Gravure et de Sculpture en 1875 (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1875), 17–​18. 74. Germaner and İnankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists, 117–​19. 75. The painting on the palace wall in this Abdullah Frères’ photograph, figures 72 and 73, is Ivan Aivazovsky, Landscape, 1861, National Palaces Collection, Istanbul Inv. No. 11/597. 76. Fausto Zonaro, “Venti anni nel regno di Abdulhamid: Memorie e opere di Fausto Zonaro,” typed manuscript, 249–​54, Collection of Erol Makzume, Istanbul. My thanks to Erol Makzume for providing access to Zonaro’s memoirs. For commentaries on the collection by other foreign visitors to the palace, see Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur, “The Ottoman Imperial Art Collection,” Constantinople and the Orientalists, 118. Sultan Abdülhamid’s deployment of photography and public ceremony as instruments of statecraft

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and international diplomacy has been extensively analyzed; see, for example, Deringil, Well-protected Domains. 77. Café égyptien is held in the National Palaces collection. Lion dans sa grotte and BachiBouzouk dansant are held in the Cumhurbaşkanlığı Atatürk Müze Köşk collection. 78. “We also learn that MM. Gérôme and Boulanger, the celebrated French painters, have received commissions from the Sultan for several of their works”; Levant Herald, April 8, 1875, 266. 79. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, İ.HR. 276 / 16850. The document in Ottoman is reprinted in Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Kültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık Vakfı Yayınları, 1995), 2:629–​30, and is reprinted and transliterated into Turkish by Sema Öner, “Tanzimat Sonrası Osmanlı Saray Çevresinde Resim Etkinliği (1839–​1923)” (PhD diss., Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, 1991), 361–​63. 80. Fanny Field Hering, The Life and Works of Jean Léon Gérôme (New York: Cassell, 1892), 225. Hering notes that the alternative title for this painting is The Lion of the Phosphorescent Eyes. In the 1878 official catalogue of the Exposition Universelle the painting is just listed as Un lion. I am indebted to Holly Clayson for her suggestion about Gérôme’s possible motivation for the inclusion of these specific paintings. 81. Gérôme to Excellency [Edhem Paşa], 6 October 1877, Collection of Edhem Eldem. 82. See Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 83. Gérôme: A Collection of the Works of J. L. Gérôme in One Hundred Photogravures, ed. Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], 4 vols. (New York, 1881). An Egyptian Café is in volume 2 and Bashi-Bazouks Dancing is in volume 3, both accompanied by extended descriptive text. In Strahan’s book the title of the latter work is in the plural in the illustration’s caption, i.e., Bashi-Bazouks Dancing, but is expressed in the singular form in the heading for the work’s text entry, i.e., Bashi-Bazouk Dancing. 84. Joseph Dubosc de Pesquidoux, L’art dans les deux mondes: Peinture et sculpture (Paris, 1878), 1:136. 85. Strahan, “Bashi-Bazouk Dancing,” Gérôme, vol. 3, n.p. 86. For further explication of these historical events and the political implications in Britain and the Ottoman Empire, see Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 131. 87. The term Bashi-Bozouk (Başıbozuk) was used to describe the irregular troops that served alongside regular Ottoman forces during times of war. The majority were of Kurdish, Albanian, and Circassian origins; Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1:1077. During the Crimean War there was an unsuccessful attempt to subject them to military discipline. The Bashi-Bozouks were so controversial during the Russo-Ottoman War that they were subsequently no longer employed by the Ottoman state; Türk Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1967), 5:383. 88. See Nochlin, “Imaginary Orient,” 52–​53; and Olivier Richon, “Representation, the Despot, and the Harem: Some Questions around an Academic Orientalist Painting by Lecomte-du-Nouy (1885),” in Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on

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the Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 1:1–​13. 89. For an analysis of the shifting perceptions of the Ottoman state toward the Zeybeks as reflected in documents in the Ottoman archives, see Atilla Çetin, “Osmanlı Arşiv belgeler­inde Zeybekler hakkında Bilgiler,” in Zeybek kültürü sempozyumu, ed. Nâmık Açıkgöz and Mehmet Naci Önal (Muğla: Muğla Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2004), 69–​70; Haydar A. Avcı, Zeybeklik ve zeybekler: Bir başkaldırı geleneğinin toplumsal ve kültürel boyutları (Hü­ckelhoven: Verlag Anadolu, 2001); Onur Akdoğu, Bir başkaldırı öyküsü: Zeybekler: Tarihi, ezgileri, dansları, 3 vols. (İzmir: O. Akdoğu, 2004). 90. For an account of the suppression of the Zeybek uprising in 1838 that resulted from attempts to forbid their dress and other later equally ineffective attempts at Zeybek dress reform in 1894 and 1905, see G. Leiser, “Zeybek,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 9:493–​94. 91. Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–​1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (August 1997): 403–​25. 92. Osman Hamdy Bey and Marie de Launay, Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye / Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873: Ouvrage publié sous le patronage de la Commission impériale ottomane pour l’Exposition universelle de Vienne (Constantinople: Imprimerie du “Levant Times and Shipping Gazette,” 1873), 141. 93. Ibid., 7; Ahmet Ersoy, “A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye Album,” in Ottoman Costumes: From Textiles to Identity, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul: Eren, 2004), 253–​70. 94. Osman Hamdy Bey and de Launay, Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye, 5; Ersoy, “Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism,” 261. 95. Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 786. For an analysis of Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings in terms of Ottoman Orientalism, see Edhem Eldem, “Osman Hamdi Bey ve Oryantalizm,” Dipnot (Kış-Bahar [Winter–​Spring] 2004): 39–​67. 96. G. Leiser, “Zeybek,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 9:494. 97. Boulanger recounted this request for a pendant painting, which he had received from the palace, in his undated letter to Osman Hamdi Bey; Boulanger to Osman Hamdi Bey, undated, Edhem Eldem collection, Istanbul. Four paintings by Boulanger are listed in the palace art inventory of 1890 that is now held in the Istanbul University Library. For an analysis of this document, see Zehra Güven Öztürk, “Ottoman Imperial Painting Collection through a Document Dating from 1890” (MA diss., Koç University, 2008), 39–40. 98. Nochlin, “Imaginary Orient,” 37.

4 . I S TA N B U L’ S A R T E X H I B I T I O N S

1. Constantinople Messenger, September 11, 1880. 2. Abdullah Kâmil, “Tarabya’da Sanayi-i Nefise Sergisi / L’Exposition des Beaux Arts à Therapia,” Osmanlı, Şevval 11, 1297 / September 16, 1880. 3. For a more extended analysis of debates about Ottoman identity and the ideology of Otto-

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

manism across this period, see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 104–​8. Ibid., 118, 131. The 1880 catalogue remains untraced. My thanks to Garo Kürkman for making a copy of the 1881 catalogue available to me. ABC Club Exposition des Beaux Arts au Chalet des Petits Champs, exh. cat. (Constantinople: 1881). Constantinople Messenger, September 11, 1880. The new club’s proposed rules were published in the Constantinople Messenger, September 16, 1880. Constantinople Messenger, September 13, 1880. See Chandrika Kaul, “Pears, Sir Edwin (1835–​1919),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online, Oxford University Press, 2004–​8, September 2013, www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/35437. Robertson retired from the Imperial Mint in 1881 and departed Istanbul for Japan on November 9 of that year; James Robertson: Photographer of Istanbul, ed. Julie Lawson, exh. cat. (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1991), 9. On Robertson’s Istanbul years see also B. A. and H. K. Henisch, “Robertson of Constantinople,” Image: Journal of Photography and Motion Pictures of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House 17, no. 3 (1974): 1–​11; B. A. and H. K. Henisch, “James Robertson of Constantinople,” History of Photography 8, no. 4 (1984): 299–​313; B. A. and H. K. Henisch, “James Robertson of Constantinople: A Chronology,” History of Photography 14, no. 1 (1990): 23–​32; Bahattin Öztuncay, James Robertson: Pioneer of Photography in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren, 1992); Luke Gartlan, “James Robertson and Felice Beato in the Crimea: Recent Findings,” History of Photography 29, no. 1 (2005): 72–​80. Constantinople Messenger, September 11, 1880. The writer for La Turquie noted that the exhibition received the patronage of Mehmed Ruchdi Pacha [sic] (ex-Grand Vizier) and his Excellency Kemal Paşa; La Turquie, April 26, 1873, 2. The same paper later reported that the sultan’s son, Prince Youssouf [sic] Izzeddin Efendi, planned to visit the exhibition; La Turquie, May 1, 1873, 1. Ahmed Ali Bey was appointed aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdülaziz from 1289 / 1873–​74. For a chronological account of his career see Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, ed. Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu and İlona Baytar, exh. cat. (Istanbul: TBMM Milli Saraylar Daire Başkanlığı, 2008), 231–​39. Ahmed Ali Bey announced in La Turquie that “The government . . . put at our disposal the superb location of Darul-Fanoum (University) situated near the tomb of Sultan Mahmoud”; Ahmed, “Beaux-Arts: Deuxième exposition annuelle,” La Turquie, May 11, 1875, 2. La Turquie later reported that the sultan, himself a painter, requested that a number of the exhibited works be brought to the palace; La Turquie, August 5, 1875, 2. La Turquie, August 5, 1875, 2. The Levant Herald critic framed the initiative and the sultan’s patronage in terms of national renewal of the arts: “in finishing, we congratulate Ahmed Bey once more for this initiative, and we must confess that we experience real satisfaction in seeing that the Sultan has taken this exhibition under his superior patronage. An artistic renaissance could be a great thing for the Orient: who knows if one day, we may not be able, yet again, to admire the fabrics, the tiles and the carpets that compare with those found in the ancient monuments of Constantinople, Broussa, Adrianople . . .

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such brilliant manifestations of a national art that seems lost to the present day”; Levant Herald, August 13, 1875. 14. Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (1971; Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Kültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık vakfı Yayınları, 1995), 2:422–​45. 15. London’s Art Journal affirmed such divisions in the cultural geography of Istanbul in its short account of the 1873 exhibition, expressing surprise that it was held in the old part of the city, Sultanahmet, and not in Pera. “It is curious to remark, observes the Moniteur, that the exhibition will be held at Stamboul, the quarter of the Mussulmans, and not at Pera, where the Christian population chiefly resides: and thus will be broken down the ideas which have so long prevailed, that the religion of the Turks will not permit the representation of the human form either in sculpture or painting”; Art Journal 35 (1873): 212. 16. For an extended account of the exhibitions of student work held in Istanbul prior to Ahmed Ali Bey’s (later Şeker Ahmed Paşa) exhibitions see Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2:423–​24. 17. See Ahmet Kamil Gören, in Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, 233, and Şerif Abdülkadirzade Hüseyin Haşim, “Ressam Şeker Ahmed Ali Paşa,” Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi no. 3, (12 Rebiyülevvel 1329 / March 1, 1911), reprinted in Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, 1911–​1914, ed. Yaprak Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2007), 23–​26. 18. La Turquie, April 29, 1873, 2. 19. Hakayik-ul Vekayi 885, Rebiülevvel 11, 1290 / May 9, 1873; see Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2:428. In 1875 the La Turquie critic disparagingly referred to the 1873 exhibition as “resembl[ing] the visiting room at a school where the best drawings of the students have been displayed for the admiration of the visiting families” and praised the 1875 exhibition for improving on this situation; La Turquie, August 4, 1875, 2. 20. Ahmed Ali published repeated announcements in the Istanbul newspapers Hakayik-ul Vekayi, Basiret, and La Turquie in February and March 1873. A notice in La Turquie indicates that another exhibition was planned for late 1874 (La Turquie, June 9, 1874, 2) but Ahmed Ali’s notice in La Turquie in November of that year indicates that this event was to be deferred until May 1875 to allow more time for artists to prepare work; Ahmed, “Exposition des Beaux-Arts à Stamboul,” La Turquie, November 27, 1874, 3; La Turquie, November 28, 1874, 3; La Turquie, December 4, 1874, 3. He published an announcement calling for work for this exhibition and indicating that the government had made the University Building available for this event; La Turquie, May 11, 1875, 2. Another report on the progress of the exhibition planning and a call for artists to submit work was published; Ahmed, “Beaux-Arts: Deuxiéme Exposition Annuelle,” La Turquie, May 11, 1875, 2. The same call was published again in La Turquie, May 13, 1875, 2; La Turquie, May 15, 1875, 2; La Turquie, May 16–​17, 1875, 2; La Turquie, May 22, 1875, 2; La Turquie, May 23–​24, 1875, 2; La Turquie, May 26, 1875, 2; La Turquie, May 27–​28, 1875, 2; La Turquie, May 30–​31, 1875, 2. Mustafa Cezar has provided the most comprehensive study of the Ottoman and expatriate newspaper coverage of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibitions in Istanbul; see Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2:425–​45. 21. Ahmet Kamil Gören, “(Şeker) Ahmed Ali Paşa’yı Yazmak (1841–​1907),” Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, 26, 29. For an analysis of art training at the Harbiye military academy

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where Ahmed Ali was first educated, see Semra Germaner, “The Interpretation of Pictorial Space in Nineteenth-century Ottoman Landscape Painting,” in The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism, ed. Zeynep İnankur, Reina Lewis, and Mary Roberts (Istanbul: Pera Museum; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 233–​40. 22. Winterhalter never traveled to Istanbul and there is no mention of this portrait in his catalogue raisonné. For an analysis of one of the anonymous portraits of Sultan Mahmud II and a speculative attribution of it to Winterhalter, see Wendy Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 29. 23. Günsel Renda, “Portraits: The Last Century,” in Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, 449. For an analysis of the controversy surrounding the public display of Mahmud’s portrait and the advent of the Tasvîr-i Hümâyûn, see Edhem Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2004), 126–​32. 24. In 1869 Ahmed Ali exhibited one painting in the Salon, No. 16: Étude de Hêtres; Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées le 1er mai 1869, exh. cat. (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères Imprimeurs des musées imperiaux, 1869), 3. Adnan Çoker proposes that this painting is one now held in the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture collection, Istanbul (Inv. No. 459/872); Ahmet Kamil Gören, “(Şeker) Ahmed Ali Paşa’yı Yazmak (1841–​1907),” Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, 30–​31. In 1870 Ahmed Ali exhibited two paintings in the Salon, No. 15: Carrefour de l’Épine; forêt de Fontainebleau and No. 16: Gorges d’Apremont; forêt de Fontainebleau; Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées le 1er mai 1870, exh. cat. (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères Imprimeurs des musées imperiaux, 1870), 3. 25. For an analysis of the education system in nineteenth-century Istanbul see Carter Vaughn Findley, “Education,” in Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 131–​73. 26. Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 27. The Osmanlı reviewer noted that the dual Ottoman and French signage was also used in the 1881 exhibition in Tepebaşı and that on Saturdays two hours were designated as exclusively for women in order to encourage Muslim women’s attendance; Osmanlı, Cumadelevvel 5, 1298 / April 5, 1881. 28. Osmanlı, Şevval 11, 1297 / September 16, 1880. Dr. Serviçen, one of the officials of the medical school, was appointed by the sultan to the Senate, Meclis-i Ayan, in March 1877. When the elected parliament was disbanded in 1878 the members of the Senate were still in favor with the sultan and continued to draw their salaries from the state; Yılmaz Kızıltan, “Meşrutiyetin İlânı ve İlk Osmanlı Meclis-i Mebusan’ı,” GÜ, Gazi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi 26, no. 1 (2006): 251–​72. For a précis of the first Ottoman parliament see Hanioğlu, Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, 118–​21. For an analysis of the political ideals of Istanbul’s Armenian elite in this period and Serviçen’s prominent role in

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arguing for a culturally defined Armenian national awakening while maintaining the political status quo of the Ottoman millet structure, see Gerard J. Libaridian, “Nation and Fatherland in Nineteenth-century Armenian Political Thought,” Armenian Review (Autumn 1983): 71–​90. 29. Dr. Serviçen was an important member of the new generation of reformers within Istanbul’s Armenian millet and one of the pioneers of the Armenian Constitutional Movement. For an account of this movement and Serviçen’s role, see Vartan Artinian, The Armenian Constitutional System in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–​1863: A Study of Its Historical Development (Istanbul: Armenian Research Center Collection, 1988). Dr. Serviçen was a senior Ottoman bureaucrat who made an important contribution to medical administration in the empire’s capital. He was well regarded by those among the most powerful Ottoman official networks in this period and was the personal physician to Mehmed Emin Ali Paşa and Fuad Paşa. For a more detailed account of his career, see Aylin Beşiryan, “Hopes of Secularization in the Ottoman Empire: The Armenian National Constitution and the Armenian Newspaper, Masis, 1856–​1863” (M. A. diss., Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, 2007), 60–​62. 30. For examples of his work in kufic script see Garo Kürkman, Armenian Painters in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–​1923 (Istanbul: Matüsalem Uzmanlık ve Yayıncılık, 2004) 2:532. 31. Ahmet Ersoy, “On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’: Architectural Revival and Its Discourse during the Abdülaziz Era (1861–​76)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000), 198. 32. Osmanlı, Şevval 11, 1297 / September 16, 1880. 33. An article promoting Walker’s art on display in her studio in “Rue Terdjiman” was published in the Levant Herald, April 23, 1875, 311, and her lectures on drawing and drawing classes are mentioned in the Constantinople Messenger, January 19, 1881, 2. 34. Walker recounts her experience as a teacher in this school; Mary Adelaide Walker, “The Turkish Girls’ School,” in Eastern Life and Scenery: With Excursions in Asia Minor, Mytilene, Crete and Roumania (London: Chapman Hall, 1886), 221–​48. 35. Salahéddin Bey, La Turquie à l’Exposition universelle de 1867 (Paris: Librairie Hachette,1867), 139–​46. 36. Walker’s portrait was one of several portraits of Sultan Abdülaziz exhibited in the Ottoman pavilion; there were two others, one by Ahmed Ali Bey (at that time a young student in Paris), and the other a photographic portrait by the Abdullah Frères, while Amadeo Preziosi exhibited a watercolor entitled La Garde noble de S. M. I. le Sultan (ibid.). 37. On Fatma Sultan’s portrait commissions, see Mary Roberts, “Contested Terrains: Women Orientalists and the Colonial Harem,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 179–​203; Mary Roberts, “The Politics of Portraiture behind the Veil,” in Art and the British Empire, ed. Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 223–​36, 399–​402; and Zeynep İnankur, “Mary Adelaide Walker,” in İnankur, Lewis, and Roberts, Poetics and Politics of Place, 199–​209. 38. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann writes about her experiences as painting tutor to Prince Halim Paşa and his wife in her memoir. When she stayed at their home on the shores of the Bosporus in Baltalimanı she saw his sizeable art collection, which included Vernet’s

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portrait of Halim Paşa’s father, Muḥammad ‘Alī Pasha, and numerous Egyptian scenes by French and British artists. She was commissioned to paint portraits of Halim Paşa and his family and he purchased three paintings by her son, Harald Jerichau—​Sunset over the Bosporus, Caravan at Sunrise, and Street in Istanbul. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede Rejsebilleder / Motley Images of Travel (Copenhagen: Forlagsbureauet, 1881), 101–​3, 123–​30. 39. Dagbladet, November 11, 1880. 40. Osmanlı Şevval 11, 1297 / September 16, 1880. Many paintings were exhibited in the Abdullah Frères photographic studio, at other commercial venues, and at artists’ studios in this period. These include exhibitions of a painting by Aivazovsky in the Abdullah Frères studio, Levant Herald, November 9, 1874, 871; works by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and her son Harald Jerichau in their Pera studio, Levant Herald, November 14, 1874, 881; Mary Walker’s paintings in her Pera studio, Levant Herald, April 23, 1875, 311; Chlebowski’s painting in the Abdullah Frères studio of the entrance to a bath, was a subject derived from a study made during his recent trip to Egypt, Levant Herald, October 15, 1875, 795; paintings in Guillemet’s Academy in Pera, La Turquie, June 29, 1876, 1–​2. For a posthumous sale of the ceramics, paintings, jewelry, textiles, and Egyptian antiquities from the collection of Mustafa Fazıl Paşa see the Levant Herald, March 2, 1876, 162. The newspapers also reported commissions by the sultan, including a painting by Osman Hamdi Bey of “a young woman having her hair done after her bath,” La Turquie, August 14, 1880, 1; Osman Hamdi’s painting of “Le Turbé de Sultan Mohammed Tchélébi” exhibited at the Abdullah Frères studio, La Turquie, August 20, 1880, 3; two paintings by Aivazovsky in the Abdullah Frères studio, Constantinople Messenger, November 23, 1880, 2; and an exhibition of the students from School of Fine Arts, Osmanlı, Şaban 16, 1301 / June 11, 1884. See also the extensive list of commercial exhibits in the 1890s and 1900s in Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 55–​56. 41. In the catalogue it is listed as number 170, Tombeau à Brousse. Both the reviews in La Turquie and Osmanlı identify it as the tomb of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed: La Turquie, April 27, 1881, 1, and Osmanlı, Cumadelevvel 11, 1298 / April 11, 1881. 42. Samuel Williams provides a very important analysis that interprets Osman Hamdi’s 1882 painting of the Bursa Yeşil Türbe in the context of contemporary Ottoman debates about historical consciousness, identity, and perceptions of imperial belonging; Samuel Williams, “The Untimely Meditations of Osman Hamdi Bey: Competing Visions of History and Belonging in the Late Ottoman Empire,” paper presented at Turkish Studies Association Graduate Student Session, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston MA, November 17, 2006. 43. La Turquie, August 20, 1880, 3. First published: Abdullah Kâmil, “Le Turbé de Sultan Mohammed Tchélébi: Tableau par Hamdy Bey,” Osmanlı, Ramazan 13, 1297 / August 19, 1880. 44. For an historiographical account of the extensive debate about Osman Hamdi’s engagement with academic realism see Edhem Eldem, “Osman Hamdi Bey ve Oryantalizm,” Dipnot, (Kış-Bahar [Winter–​Spring] 2004): 39–​67. 45. A similar sentiment of appreciation for Ottoman Islamic religious monuments is evident in an article published in the same journal in 1884. Describing a recent painting by Süleyman Seyyid of the Eyüp Sultan Mosque complex (and noting it as a site often overlooked by foreign travelers who write about the city), this author uses the occasion to note

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the great historic, cultural, and religious significance of this site for the Ottomans; “Un coup d’œil archéologique sur Constantinople musulmane,” Osmanlı, Şaban 4, 1301 / May 30, 1884. On the transformation of Bursa in this period and its significance for notions of Ottoman patrimony see Beatrice St. Laurent, “Ottomanization and Modernization: The Architectural and Urban Development of Bursa and the Genesis of Tradition, 1839–​ 1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1989), and Ahmet Ersoy, “Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’.” 46. La Turquie, August 20, 1880, 3. 47. See Mary Roberts, “Osman Hamdi Bey and Ottoman Aestheticism,” in Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850–1900, ed. Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski (Aldershot: Ashgate, in press). 48. The absorptive effect of Osman Hamdi Bey’s painting is further evident when we compare it with Lewis’s watercolor sketch of a solitary worshipper in the same space, where the worshipper looks out of the picture, as if momentarily interrupted by the spectator /  visitor. Illustrated in The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, ed. Nicholas Tromans, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2008), 171. 49. La Turquie, August 20, 1880, 3. 50. Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople: The Recollections of Sir Edwin Pears, 1873–​1915 (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916), illustration facing page 6; Théophile Gautier, Constantinople of Today, trans. Robert Howe Gould (London: David Bogue, 1854); Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople: Pioneers, Studios and Artists from Nineteenth-century Istanbul (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2003), 1:150. 51. Mary Adelaide Walker, Old Tracks and New Landmarks: Wayside Sketches in Crete, Macdeonia, Mitylene, etc. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1897), 331. 52. Ibid., 333. 53. Ibid., 356. 54. Ibid., 357. Walker’s praise for Ahmed Vefik Paşa’s civic reforms (particularly his restoration projects in the former Ottoman capital of Bursa after the earthquake that caused so much destruction in 1855) is even more effusive in her chapter on Bursa. See Walker, Eastern Life and Scenery, 2:107–​9. 55. Walker, Old Tracks and New Landmarks, 360. 56. Walker notes, for example, evidence of the telegraph system, one of the indices of modern telecommunications, at the “Sweet Waters of Asia” (ibid., 352). Such disjunctions are unfamiliar in the more well-known picturesque Orientalist representations of this leisure site. Walker’s emphasis on an ideal of progress and the failures of this modernizing reform contrasts with the notion of “progress as loss” that characterizes Thomas Allom’s picturesque Istanbul landscapes and Robert Walsh’s text in their book Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor (London: Fisher, Son, ca. 1839). For an analysis of this notion in Allom and Walsh’s popular book, see Wendy M. K. Shaw, “Between the Sublime and the Picturesque: Mourning Modernization and the Production of Orientalist Landscape in Thomas Allom and Reverend Robert Walsh’s Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor (c.1839),” in İnankur, Lewis, and Roberts, Poetics and Politics of Place, 115–​25. 57. In an analogous contemporary case, Lynda Nead analyzes the representations of London

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in the illustrated press as exemplary of a “metropolitan picturesque” that deploys the resources of the picturesque aesthetic in an effort to accommodate the piecemeal modernizing changes to London’s urbanscape and to contain the city’s past within the present. Nead perceptively analyzes this conjunction of old and new in the urbanscape in terms of Michel Serres’s concept of pleated time. “London’s past had to be endlessly rewritten and re-imaged; contained through the conventions of text and image and assimilated within a manageable lexicon of the metropolitan picturesque”; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 8, 31–​33. 58. Walker, Old Tracks and New Landmarks, 343. 59. “Nkarahandes (Art Exhibition),” Ardzagank 22 (July 18, 1882): 349–​50. I have not been able to trace the article in Masis, but Ardzagank cites the Istanbul newspaper as its source at the end of the article. 60. Vahé Oshagan, “Cultural and Literary Awakening of Western Armenians, 1789–​1915,” Armenian Review 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 57–​70. 61. For an account of the impact of the Tanzimat reforms and secularization on the ­Armenian millet see Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2:125–6. 62. The amiras—​the financiers, technocrats, and industrialists—​were powerful intermediaries between the empire and the Armenian millet. See Hagop L. Barsoumian, The Armenian Amira Class of Istanbul (Yerevan: American University of Armenia, 2007). 63. The Armenian community within the Russian Empire also had an ambivalent relationship with Imperial Russia. Lisa Khachaturian provides an important account of the shifting attitudes in the latter decades of the nineteenth century that encompasses an emphasis on an Armenian cultural revival that was compatible with coexistence within a multiethnic empire. This review of an Istanbul exhibition for the press in Tiflis is exemplary of the international reach of this Armenian cultural revival in this key hub for nineteenth-century Armenian culture. On the role of Armenian journalists within the Russian Empire (especially in Tiflis) in a cultural revival that sought to bring together the disparate Armenian communities, see Lisa Khachaturian, Cultivating Nationhood in Imperial Russia: The Periodical Press and the Formation of a Modern Armenian Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009); Lisa Khachaturian, “Cultivating Nationhood in Imperial Russia: The Periodical Press and the Formation of a Modern Eastern Armenian Identity” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2005). 64. Garo Kürkman provides the most comprehensive account of Armenian artists in Istanbul in his Armenian Painters in the Ottoman Empire 1600–1923, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Matüsalem Publications, 2004). For an account of the Armenian artists at the Istanbul exhibitions, see also Kevork Pamukciyan, “Osmanlı Döneminde İstanbul Sergilerine Katılan Ermeni Ressamlar,” Tarih ve Toplum 80 (1990): 98–​105. 65. Teodik, Amenun Taretsuytse, Constantinople, 1915, 273–​78. Yervant Osgan studied in Venice and Paris. For a fuller account of his career, see Minas Sargsyan, “Kandakagorts Yervant Osgan,” Sovetakan Arvest 2 (1965): 49–​52; Yeghishe Martikian, “Yervant Osgan,” in Haykakan Kerparvesti Patmutyun (Yerevan: Sovetakan Grogh, 1975), 2:103–​8; and Kürkman, Armenian Painters in the Ottoman Empire, 2:678. Yervant Osgan taught sculp-

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ture at the school from its founding in 1883 until his death in 1914. For a history of the founding of the school see Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2:448–​75, and Mustafa Cezar, “From the Academy of Fine Arts to Mimar Sinan University. First Period: 1882–​1928. The Academy of Fine Arts,” Sanayi-i Nefise Muallimleri Resim ve Heykel Sergisi, ed. Salim Yavaşoğlu, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi, 2004), 9–​37. 66. For an analysis of the diary written by Yervant Osgan and the photographs taken during their travels, see Edhem Eldem, “An Ottoman Traveler to the Orient: Osman Hamdi Bey,” in İnankur, Lewis, and Roberts, Poetics and Politics of Place, 183–​95. Eldhem notes the distant ethnographic attitude toward the local Kurds that is evident in both the photographs and written account produced by these two men from the empire’s capital. 67. “And on the shore he was a wanderer; There was a mass of many images Crowded like waves upon me, but he was A part of all; and in the last he lay Reposing from the noontide sultriness, Couched among fallen columns, in the shade Of ruined walls that had survived the names Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds Were fastened near a fountain; and a man, Glad in a flowing garb, did watch the while, While many of his tribe slumbered around: And they were canopied by the blue sky, So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful, That God alone was to be seen in heaven.” Byron, “The Dream,” stanza 4, lines 111–​25

68. The print was extensively and enthusiastically promoted in the British press when it was first published in 1833; The Times, November 19, 1833, 4; Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Lettres, November 23, 1833, 747–​48; Athenaeum, November 23, 1833, 796; Court Journal, November 30, 1833, 813. 69. Between 1850 and 1870 a strong strain of Romanticism, influenced by the movement in Western Europe, developed among Armenian writers, poets, and playwrights in Turkey in whose work figures from Armenian history were glorified. As Oshagan notes: “Above all, these writers created the prototype of the modern ‘poet’ in a culture where no such thing existed before . . . . What made this literary symbol a force of social change was the fact that from then on Armenians, especially the youth, identified the sufferings of the people—​the unloved, lonely, emotionally starved, poor, insecure, but talented nation—​ with the poet’s image. The romantic, virtuous, and patriotic hero became the dominant figure in the new self-consciousness, nurturing around itself the nascent aspirations of the period.” Oshagan, “Cultural and Literary Awakening of Western Armenians, 1789–​ 1915,” 64. Byron was of particular interest to Armenian writers because of his commitment to Armenian language and culture. In 1816 Byron visited the Mechitarist Order at the convent of St. Lazarus, a center of Armenian culture, where he studied Armenian. His letters recounting this experience, translations of Armenian history and from the

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Armenian Bible, as well as some of his poems, were published in English and Armenian in 1870. George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron’s Armenian Exercises and Poetry (Venice: In the Island of S. Lazzaro, 1870). His visit was celebrated by Aivazovsky in his painting Byron on the Island of San Lazzaro, 1899. 70. Photographer Kevork Abdullah’s association with the Russian delegation who were in Istanbul for the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano after the Ottoman defeat during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877 led to Sultan Abdülhamid stripping the Ottoman-Armenian photographic firm, the Abdullah Frères, of their appointment as official court photographers. In 1889 Kevork’s brother, Vichen, won back the support of Abdülhamid and consequently was bestowed the title “Chief photographer to his majesty the Sultan.” For an account of the vicissitudes of this family firm and their political allegiances, see Öztuncay, Photographers of Constantinople, 1:179–​233. 71. For an analysis of the shifting historiography of this issue see Fatma Müge Göçek, “Defining the Parameters of a Post-nationalist Turkish Historiography through the Case of the Anatolian Armenians,” Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-nationalist Identities, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 85–​103. For an analysis of the Armenian communities in Istanbul in this period and their responses to the situation in Anatolia, see Richard Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian, eds., Armenian Constantinople (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2010), especially the essays by Ohannes Kilıçdağı and Robert Krikorian. 72. For an analysis of the ethnographic impulse in Orientalist photography see Ayşe Erdoğdu, “Selling the Orient: Nineteenth-century Photographs of Istanbul in European Markets” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 1989), 138–​86. For an analysis of the Ottoman elite’s embrace of an ethnographic sensibility in relation to the empire’s poorer classes and communities in the empire’s peripheries, see Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 768–​96, and Selim Deringil, “ ‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (April 2003): 311–​42. 73. “Nkarahandes,” Ardzagank 22 (July 18, 1882): 349–​50. 74. Constantinople Messenger / Eastern Express, May 20, 1882, 2. 75. Constantinople Messenger / Eastern Express, May 25, 1882, 2. 76. For an account of these events see Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2:193–​95. 77. See for example, “The Lion and the Fox,” Punch, August 5, 1882, and “The Lion’s Just Share,” Punch, September 30, 1882. Cetewayo is the subject of a caricature, Punch, July 22, 1882, 28, and Bradlaugh in “Punch’s Fancy Portraits. No. 48, Mr. Bradlaugh, M. P., The Northampton Cherub,” Punch, September 10, 1881, 118. 78. Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa, 1880–​ 1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 57. 79. Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Wendy Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

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80. My approach here is influenced by the extensive debates over the last two decades about network theory. On the concept of multiplexity in particular see Roger Gould, “Multiple Networks and Mobilization in the Paris Commune, 1871,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 716–​29, and Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 6 (1994): 1411–​54.

5. S E L F - P O R T R A I T U R E I N O T T O M A N I S TA N B U L

Epigraph: Osman Hamdi Bey, letter from Paris written to his father, İbrahim Edhem Paşa, June 26, 1868. Held in the collection of Edhem Eldem, Istanbul. Reproduced in Edhem Eldem, “Bir Ressam Doğuyor: Osman Hamdi Bey’in Sanat Hayatının İlk Aşamaları,” in Batı’ya Yolculuk—​Türk Resminin 70 Yıllık Serüveni (1860–​1930), ed. Ferit Edgü, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi, 2009), 26. 1. In his memoir Zonaro transcribes a newspaper account by Giuseppe Zaccagnini that cites the Italian government’s award of a medal to the artist and later writes about the reception of this news in Istanbul; Fausto Zonaro, Venti anni nel regno di Abdulhamid: Memorie e opere di Fausto Zonaro / Twenty Years under the Reign of Abdülhamid: The Memoirs and Works of Fausto Zonaro, ed. Erol Makzume and Cesare Mario Trevigne, trans. Dylan Clements (Istanbul: Geniş Kitaplık, 2011), 158, 189. 2. Osman Öndeş and Erol Makzume, Fausto Zonaro: Ottoman Court Painter (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, Istanbul, 2003), 29. See also Adolphe Thalasso, “Fausto Zonaro: Peintre de S. M. I. le Sultan,” Figaro Illustré 203 (February 1907): 21–​32. 3. Philip Mansel, “The Last Court Painter: Fausto Zonaro and Abdülhamid II,” in Fausto Zonaro: From the Venice Lagoon to the Shores of the Bosphorus, An Italian Painter at the Court of the Sultan, ed. Giovanna Damiani, Roberta Ferrazza, and Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık: Istanbul, 2004), 42; Aykut Gürçağlar, “Padualı Bir Ressam Gözüyle: Zonaro’nun İstanbulu’u/Istanbul through the Eyes of a Paduan Painter,” Türkiyemiz Kültür ve Sanat Dergisi 65 (October 1991): 20–​31. 4. Selim Deringil, Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–​1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 16. 5. Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists (Istanbul: İşbank, Istanbul, 2002), 146–​47; Deringil, Well-protected Domains, 25. 6. Deringil, Well-protected Domains, 35. 7. Documents related to the award of Ottoman medals to Fausto Zonaro and his promotions in rank are held in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul: I.TAL.157.1316.B-027; I.TAL.166.1316.L-004; I.TAL.178.1317S-012; I.TAL.350.1322N-079. For a history of Ottoman medals, see Edhem Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2004). 8. Zonaro provides an extended account of his visit to another dervish lodge in central Istanbul and his involvement in this ritual. He writes about the extraordinary distracting physical discomfort of sitting on his knees throughout the ceremony—​this is a remarkable contrast to the immersive experience rendered in his painting. “They begin the rite of invocation in a low voice and slowly becoming louder, and, swaying their heads

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from side to side—​which reflects the rise in tempo and tone—​in total unison, they add groaning into their melody. . . . I follow every movement, recording them to my memory. In the meantime, the pain in my ankles does not cease and my calves are in agony. What could be said about my poor knees? I cannot feel them anymore, as though I am crouched on a pile of thorns.” Zonaro, Venti Anni nel Regno di Abdulhamid, 197. 9. This is the Sheikh Hafız Efendi Tekke at Menzilhane-Üsküdar, “founded by Defter Emini Hacı Yusuf Rıza Efendi in 1732 and restored finally in the second half of the nineteenth century. Now demolished, it was the Rufai asitane in Istanbul.” M. Baha Tanman, “Settings for the Veneration of Saints,” in The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey, ed. Raymond Lifchez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 155–​56. For an account of this lodge and its history see also M. Baha Tanman, “Rıfaî Âsitanesi,” in Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı, 1994), 324–​25. 10. For example, see A Handbook for Travellers in Turkey: Describing Constantinople, European Turkey, Asia Minor, Armenia, and Mesopotamia—​With New Travelling Maps and Plans, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1854). The 1840 Murray guide describes self-harming rituals that take place among the Rıfaî dervishes, yet in the 1854 guide these practices are written about in the past tense. 11. Théophile Gautier, Constantinople of Today, trans. Robert Howe Gould (London: David Bogue, 1854), 151–​55. Insisting that there were parallels between the Rıfaî ceremony and religious rituals in Europe, Gautier was particularly critical of the skepticism of some monks in the audience who laughed during the ceremony. It was, however, the Mevlevi ceremony that most impressed Gautier. 12. Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 65. The connection between the brotherhoods and Ottoman political history is extremely complex. See Lifchez, Dervish Lodge. 13. Zonaro, Venti anni nel regno di Abdulhamid, 195. 14. Ibid., 197–​98. 15. Öndeş and Makzume, Fausto Zonaro, 95–​104. 16. Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1855–​56). 17. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 195. 18. Zonaro, Venti anni nel regno di Abdulhamid, 198. 19. Öndeş and Makzume, Fausto Zonaro, 107–​13. 20. Although the painting is undated, in his comprehensive assessment of the documentary evidence related to Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s career, Ahmet Gören conjectures that the work was painted in the 1880s. Ahmet Kamil Gören, “Ek: (Şeker) Ahmed Ali Paşa’yı Yazmak: Zamandizinsel Bir Deneme,” in Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, ed. Ömer Faruk Şerifoğlu and İlona Baytar, exh. cat. (Istanbul: TBMM Milli Saraylar Daire Başkanlığı, 2008), 239. 21. Sema Öner, “Osmanlı Sarayı ve Yaver Ressamlar,” EJOS 4, no. 55 (2001): 1–​30. 22. Şerif Mardin, “Super Westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” in Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives, ed. Peter Benedict, Erol Tümertekin, and Fatma Mansur (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 403–​46. 23. As Germaner and İnankur argue, the landscape painting that Şeker Ahmed Paşa gifted

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to Ahmed Midhat Efendi on the occasion of his son’s birth is indicative of the friendship between the two men. See Germaner and İnankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists, 109. 24. Cemal Tollu, Şeker Ahmet Paşa (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1967); John Berger, “Seker Ahmet and the Forest,” in About Looking (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980), 79–​86; Ahmet Kamil Gören, “(Şeker) Ahmed Ali Paşa’yı Yazmak (1841–​1907),” in Şerifoğlu and Baytar, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, 17–​69. 25. Tollu, Şeker Ahmet Paşa, and Berger, “Seker Ahmet and the Forest,” 85. 26. For an account of his years in Paris see Gören, “(Şeker) Ahmed Ali Paşa’yı Yazmak (1841–​ 1907),” in Şerifoğlu and Baytar, Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 1841–​1907, 27–​33. 27. Coming from an Ottoman Islamic tradition where signatures were rarely used, Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s decision to sign in both scripts is a distinctive statement of a modern artistic identity. On the adoption of signatures within late Ottoman culture see Edhem Eldem, “Culture et signature: Quelques remarques sur les signatures de clients de la Banque Impériale Ottomane au début du XXe siècle,” Études turques et ottomanes: Documents de travail, l’oral et l’écrit 2 (1993): 63–​74. 28. The term is Victor Stoichita’s. See his brilliant analysis of self-portraiture in early modern Europe: Victor Stoichita, “Two Images: The Painter / The Act of Painting,” in The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198–​267, 308–​14. 29. The fact of his marriage to a European woman is an index of Osman Hamdi’s cosmopolitanism; so too this painting renders his wife’s traversal of cultures through her sartorial performance. There is some conjecture as to whether this is Osman Hamdi’s first wife, Agarithe, or his second wife, Marie Palyart (Naile). The ambiguous time frame of the painting and the uncertainties as to precisely when in the late 1870s Osman Hamdi separated from Agarithe and married Naile could encompass either. Edhem Eldem is of the view that it was his first wife who is represented and thus conjectures that the painting was created in 1877 or 1878. Edhem Eldem, Osman Hamdi Bey Sözlüğü (Ankara: T. C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 2010), 69. Given the continuing ambiguity, throughout this chapter I refer to the figure in this painting as his “wife” rather than invoke the proper name of either woman. 30. The Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Istanbul has the original Sébah glass plate negative. My sincere thanks to Nurhan Özgenler and Anja Slawisch for allowing me to study this negative in October 2011. 31. Osman Hamdi’s friend Ahmed İhsan wrote about his visit to Osman Hamdi Bey’s studio in Kuruçeşme in an article that he published in 1906 in Servet-i Fünun. İhsan describes a studio crowded with the artist’s oil sketches as well as the costumes and other props for his paintings. The article is partially transcribed in Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 1:358. Mustafa Cezar also reproduces photographs of Osman Hamdi in his studio and of the family at the Gebze house. Edhem Eldem is of the view that the painting studio is fictional since Osman Hamdi’s home is unlikely to have contained such a room and that even his father’s konak in Kantarcılar was unlikely to have been this grand; Eldem, Osman Hamdi Bey Sözlüğü, 67.

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32. See the photograph of his studio reproduced in Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme with a Catalogue Raisonné (London: Sotheby’s, 1986), 15. 33. Catalogue des objets d’art de l’Orient et de l’Occident tableaux, dessins composant la collection de feu M. Albert Goupil, Hôtel Drouot, 23–​27 April 1888 (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Art, 1888). 34. David J. Roxburgh, “Au Bonheur des Amateurs: Collecting and Exhibiting Islamic Art, ca. 1880–​1910,” Ars Orientalis 30 (2000): 9–​38. 35. A document dated 15 November 1875 lists twenty-four Faïences that Stanisław Chlebowski sold to William Henry Wrench. Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.236–04: 28. Between 1874 and 1876 Chlebowski also sold and gifted Persian and Turkish carpets, İznik ceramics, a Persian manuscript, costumes, Ottoman helmets, and other weapons to the French art dealer and collector Albert Goupil and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Chlebowski also created elaborate displays in his home in Pera. Within these Istanbul networks both Ottomans and Orientalists were displaying European and Islamic art on their walls. It is known, for example, that Osman Hamdi bought paintings for his father, including one by Gérôme; see Ahmet Ersoy, “On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’: Architectural Revival and Its Discourse during the Abdülaziz Era (1861–76)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000), 134. 36. The restoration and modernization of Bursa became a focus for the Ottoman administration between 1860 and 1882; see Beatrice St. Laurent, “Ottomanization and Modernization: The Architectural and Urban Development of Bursa and the Genesis of Tradition, 1839–​1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1989), 103. 37. On the craft revival in the Ottoman Empire see Ersoy, “Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’,” ch. 1, 26–​117. 38. The Islamic arts division within the Ottoman Imperial Museum was established in 1889 and in 1908 was moved to the Tiled Pavilion, then in 1914 to the Islamic Foundations Museum located in the imaret of the Süleymaniye Mosque complex. See Wendy Shaw’s account of these changes in her Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 172–​84, 208–​12, and “Advent of the Museum of Islamic Foundations,” in 1001 Faces of Orientalism, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum, 2013), 200–​7. 39. See Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, ch. 7, 172–​84. 40. V. Belgin Demirsar, Osman Hamdi Tablolarında Gerçekle İlişkiler (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1989), 29. 41. On Osman Hamdi’s archaeological interests and the development of Ottoman archaeology see Shaw, Possessor and Possessed; Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, eds., Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–​1914 (Istanbul: SALT / Garanti Kültür A. Ş., 2011); and Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archaeology, Diplomacy, Art, ed. Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout, exh. cat. (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2011). 42. Demirsar, Osman Hamdi Tablolarında Gerçekle İlişkiler, 29. 43. See, for example, Zeynep Çelik’s important interpretation, “Speaking Back to Orientalist

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Discourse,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 22–​25. 44. Ahmet Ersoy, “Osman Hamdi Bey and the Historiophile Mood: Orientalist Vision and the Romantic Sense of the Past in Late Ottoman Culture,” in The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism, ed. Zeynep İnankur, Reina Lewis, and Mary Roberts (Istanbul: Pera Museum; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 145–​55. 45. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 102. Numerous scholars have interpreted this phenomena of embedded self-portraiture in Osman Hamdi’s paintings and analyzed the photographs of the artist posed in traditional Ottoman costumes on which a number of these paintings were based. Two of the most recent essays that reflect on the significance of this role-playing within Osman Hamdi’s oeuvre are Emine Fetvacı’s “Osman Hamdi Bey’in Sanatı / The Art of Osman Hamdi Bey,” in Holod and Ousterhout, Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans, 119–​36, and Edhem Eldem, “Making Sense of Osman Hamdi Bey and His Paintings,” Muqarnas 29 (November 2012): 339–​83. Eldem engages with the various readings of this embedded self-portraiture as part of a broader challenge to some of the current interpretations of Osman Hamdi’s paintings. He favors a pragmatic explanation (“a lack of models”) while acknowledging that this role-playing in “Oriental poses” was a persistent and significant part of his oeuvre. 46. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 178. 47. Ibid., 103. 48. Ibid., 104. Shaw later nuances this gendered interpretation: “In contrast to the odalisques who populated European visions of the harem, this woman turns her back on both the viewer and the artist, refusing the sexual or colonial gaze. She grants the power of the gaze only to her husband, an Eastern man”; Wendy Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 84. 49. See Mary Roberts, “Osman Hamdi Bey and Ottoman Aestheticism,” in Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?, ed. Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski (Aldershot: Ashgate, in press). 50. “Among the genre pictures one re-discovery is to be made of great interest, the work of Osman Hamdy Bey, who exhibited one picture, ‘Jeune Émir à l’étude,’ in 1906. A Constantinopolitan, he wisely treats Oriental subjects in a manner reminding Englishmen of Lewis. He has the fine Oriental feeling for the harmony of vivid colour more properly Persian than Turkish, and he is capable of a dignified pathos not to be found in Lewis’s work”; Anonymous, “Burlington House. First Notice,” The Academy, May 1, 1909, 56. For an extended analysis of the critical reception of Osman Hamdi Bey’s art exhibited in London see Edhem Eldem, “What’s in a Name? Osman Hamdi Bey’s Genesis,” in Archaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands, ed. Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2010 (www.ottomanlands .com/essays/osman-hamdi-bey, last accessed September 28, 2013). See also Eldem, “Making Sense of Osman Hamdi Bey and His Paintings,” 339–​83. 51. In 1872 the critic for the Illustrated London News reproached Lewis as follows: “Many of the passages imitative of ornamental details . . . [are] not only captivatingly resplendent in colour, but likewise almost illusive in truth of effect. Yet sound criticism cannot accept

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pictures constructed on the principles which this painter has adopted as works of fine art in the strictest and highest sense. There is here little artistic interpretation in the best acceptation of the word . . . weakest where it should be strongest, as in the faces.” Illustrated London News, May 25, 1872, 502. The Istanbul-based critic writing for the Constantinople Messenger voiced a similar (albeit less strident) critique of Osman Hamdi’s painting Two Musician Girls: “in a very charming picture by Hamdi Bey (No. 136) of two girls with musical instruments. Nothing can surpass the excellent rendering of the testures [sic] of the draperies and the tiles of the background, which perhaps a little outshine the flesh tints.” Constantinople Messenger, September 11, 1880. 52. For an account of these repetitions in Lewis’s images of women see Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Nineteenth-century Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 164n23. 53. Demirsar, Osman Hamdi Tablolarında Gerçekle İlişkiler, 33, 37. 54. Two years later Osman Hamdi reiterated the same subject with variations. As well as the more obvious change, the pink color of Naile’s dress, the play between surface and depth is iterated slightly differently in this version. The spatial illusion created by Naile pressing into the couch is counterposed with the spatial compression of the continuous wall surface. The emphasis on playful, subtle variations in these two paintings provides further evidence of Osman Hamdi’s Aestheticist tendencies. For an illustration of the 1883 paintings see Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2:673. 55. In the 1873 Ottoman costume book, Oya is noted as a distinctively Turkish decorative tradition that was popular in the Ottoman capital; Osman Hamdy Bey and Marie de Launay, Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye/Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873: Ouvrage publié sous le patronage de la Commission impériale ottomane pour l’Exposition universelle de Vienne (Constantinople: Imprimerie du “Levant Times and Shipping Gazette,” 1873), 23. 56. This officially sponsored Ottoman project was a cosmopolitan collaboration. The text in French was written by three authors: Marie de Launay (an Ottoman official of French origin); Pietro Montani Efendi (culturally a Levantine, who was born in Italy but grew up in Istanbul), who contributed the chapter on the theory of Ottoman architecture; and Mehmed Şevki Efendi, who provided the introduction. At the time all three worked for the Ottoman Ministry of Trade and Public Works under the direction of Osman Hamdi Bey’s father, İbrahim Edhem Paşa (he may have also collaborated with Ahmed Vefik Paşa on the Ottoman translation of the book). The plates for the book were created by Eugène Maillord and the Ottoman-Armenian artist Boğos Şaşyan. For an extremely thorough and nuanced account of the book’s authorship see Ersoy, “Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’,” 118–​201. 57. An analogy is drawn between the metamorphosis of ornament (the process of stylized abstraction) and the transformation process of mineral crystallization—​Marie de Launay et al., Usul-i Miʻmari-i ʻOsmani/L’architecture ottomane (Constantinople, 1873)—​and this approach to the metamorphosis of ornament is attributed by Ahmet Ersoy to Montani given his great interest in minerology; see Ersoy, “Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’,” 299–​300. 58. Ibid., 300. 59. Ibid., 303. 60. Edhem Eldem has recently called into question Osman Hamdi’s role in authoring this

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text; most likely Marie de Launay wrote the text. Osman Hamdi was nonetheless credited with joint authorship and no doubt he approved its publication. 61. Osman Hamdy Bey and de Launay, Elbise-i ʻOsmaniyye, 23. For an analysis of this book and the context in which it was displayed at the 1873 Exposition in Vienna, see Ahmet Ersoy, “A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye Album,” Muqarnas 20 (2003): 187–​207. 62. Edhem Eldem, “Batılılaşma, Modernleşme ve Kozmopolitizm: 19. yüzyıl sonu ve 20. yüzyıl başında İstanbul,” in Osman Hamdi Bey ve Dönemi: Sempozyum, 17–​18 Aralık 1992, ed. Zeynep Rona (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1993), 16. 63. For an extended analysis of this portrait and its iconographic references see Leonée Ormond, Frederic Leighton, 1830–​1896, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1996), 190; and Paul Barlow, “Transparent Bodies, Opaque Identities: Personification, Narrative and Portraiture,” in Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, ed. Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 193–​219. 64. For the concept of collective identity as defined through group portraiture among the French avant-garde in this period see Bridget Alsdorf, Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-century French Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Feyhaman Duran’s Group Portrait of Artists (1921) is the best-known portrait of the 1914 generation of Ottoman artists; for an analysis see Shaw, Ottoman Painting, 132–​33.

EPILOGUE

Epigraph: Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 6–​7. 1. One such figure is Stanisław Chlebowski, who believed that an artist in Istanbul had to be a worldly figure keeping up to date with all of the latest goings-on in the city. In a 1869 letter to a Monsieur Bonnaire, he wrote of the need to stay connected to Istanbul’s political and financial networks in particular: “You are well aware, dear Monsieur Bonnaire, that I am not a businessman and God knows that I would not want to occupy myself with anything other than painting, but You Know Constantinople, You know to what extent everything here is different from in other countries and that everything is done through connections and through personal influence. So, without seeking to be, I have always kept abreast of all that happens here in the political and financial world.” Chlebowski to Bonnaire, 23 September 1869, Chlebowski Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Przyb.Rkp.235_04: 47. 2. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 39. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Ibid., 22. 6. In his inimitable descriptive prose, Baudelaire noted marvelous details such as the “massive great carriages, rather like coaches of the time of Louis XV, but gilded and decked out in a bizarre Oriental manner, from which every now and then there dart curiously

NOTES TO PAGES 165–172

   •   2 23

feminine glances, peeping out from between the strict interval left by the bands of muslin stuck over the face” (ibid., 21–​22). 7. Wilkie wrote: “His Highness was most particular about the likeness, which, in the course of sitting, I had to alter variously, the Sultan taking sometimes the brush with colours, and indicating the alteration he wished made . . . His Majesty conversed with Mr. Pisani with great familiarity, and upon subjects, from the names mentioned, relating to public affairs. He seemed at times greatly amused, showed complete relaxation, and displayed that expression most favourable to a portrait.” Allan Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie; With His Journals, Tours, and Critical Remarks on Works of Art and a Selection from His Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1843), 3:351. 8. Walker recounts her lively interactions with Fatma Sultan (the daughter of Sultan Abdülmecid) during portrait sittings where the Ottoman princess insisted upon being portrayed in hybrid European-Ottoman dress. In her travelogue, Walker describes these sittings at length, using the pseudonym Zeïneb to disguise the identity of her sitter; Mary Adelaide Walker, Eastern Life and Scenery (London: Chapman and Hall, 1886), 1:8–​18. 9.  Fausto Zonaro, Venti anni nel regno di Abdulhamid: Memorie e opere di Fausto Zonaro /  Twenty Years under the Reign of Abdülhamid: The Memoirs and Works of Fausto Zonaro, ed. Erol Makzume and Cesare Mario Trevigne, trans. Dylan Clements (Istanbul: Geniş Kitaplık, 2011), 199.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate an illustration. ABC club (Artists of the Bosphorus and Constantinople), 112. See also exhibitions in Istanbul in the 1880s, transcultural nature of Abdülaziz, Sultan (r. 1861–​76): Abdülhamid displaying portrait of, 200–​201n34; abject photograph of, following deposition, 68; as arbiter of collection, 88, 100; as artist-patron, 16, 56, 58, 72, 88; cartes de visite portraits of, 37, 38, 45, 47, 50– ​51, 50– ​51; deposition and death of, 68, 88; European visit by, 47–​53, 48– ​51, 53, 92–​93, 94, 95, 120; Gérôme’s paintings acquired by, 17; in group portraits, 66–​67, 67; military reforms and, 45, 66, 67, 72, 189n17; miniature portraits of, 45, 47, 47, 189–​190n20; and music, 52, 190–​ 191nn28,29; as patron of Chlebowski, 37, 39; photographic portraits of, 45, 47–​53, 48– ​51, 73; photography embraced by, 37, 38, 39, 48–​52; portraits of, in 1867 Paris Exposition, 120, 211n36; skill and passion

for painting, 1, 2–​3, 39, 53, 88; and statemaking through visual culture, 2, 16, 53, 67–​68, 74–​75; strategic use of palace collection for diplomacy, 100. See also battle painting cycle, as collaboration between Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz; Ottoman palace art collection Abdülhamid I, Sultan (r. 1774–​89), Young Album portrait of, 26, 27, 28 Abdülhamid II, Sultan (r. 1876–​1909): and Abdullah Frères photographers, 216n70; accompanying Abdülaziz to Europe, 73, 94; and battle painting cycle (Chlebowski), 72; censorship of art exhibitions, 134–​135; deposition of, 148; and group portraits (unlocated) by Chlebowski, 72; and inclusion, strategies of, 141; and palace art collection, 88, 93–​94, 100, 200–​201n34; photographic portrait of (London, 1867), and its later unofficial use, 73; photography and, 10, 73; and state ceremony, 94, 139–​1 41,

2 41

Abdülhamid II, Sultan (continued) 139–​1 40, 148; and state making through visual culture, 68, 72; and the Sufi brotherhoods within the Ottoman empire, 144–​1 46; Zonaro as court painter for, 100, 138–​139, 141, 142, 145–​1 46, 148, 150, 168. See also pan-Islamism Abdullah Frères (Armenian photography firm): carte de visite of Abdülaziz, 37, 38, 51, 51; Cartes-de-visite of the Young Album, 15, 33–​35, 34, 36; Fuad Paşa and, 39; Gérôme and, 79, 199n20; as official photographers to the Ottoman palace, 33, 79, 187n34, 216n70; painting exhibitions in studio of, 122, 176–​177n8, 212n40; Palace Interior, 101, 109; Polychromatic Tile Panels (c. 1575) from the Imperial Baths, Installed in the Altın Yol, Topkapı Palace, 75, 76; portraits of Abdülaziz, 48 Abdullah Kâmil, review in Osmanlı, 111, 118, 120, 122–​126, 129, 130, 210n27 Abdullah, Kevork, 216n70 Abdullah, Vichen, 216n70 Abdülmecid, Sultan, 190–​191n28, 200–​ 201n34; as artist-patron, 172–​173, 224n7. See also Tanzimat absorption, Fausto Zonaro and, 143–​1 44, 146, 147–​1 48, 170 academic painting: Osman Hamdi Bey and, 115, 122–​123, 156, 160–​161, 162, 167–​168; Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) and, 113, 115, 117, 151–​152, 156, 170 Academy of Fine Arts (Istanbul), 5, 115, 130, 169 Ackerman, Gerald M., 102 aestheticism. See Lewis, John Frederick; Osman Hamdi Bey; Ottoman Aestheticism; transcultural aesthetics After İftar (Osman Hamdi Bey), 162 Aḥmad ʿUrābī Pasha (Ahmet Urabi Paşa), 135 Ahmed Ali. See Şeker Ahmed Paşa Ahmed Bey, 88 Ahmed İhsan, 219n31 Ahmed Midhat Efendi, 153, 218–​219n23 Ahmed Vefik Paşa, 79, 128–​129, 158–​159, 194n51, 198–​199nn18,19, 213n54, 222n56

Moonlight, 84, 86, 100, 101, 200–​201n34; Sarayburnu, 131, 132 Alemdağ Landscape (Şeker Ahmed Paşa), 117, 117 Algeria, 12 amira class, defined, 214n62 An Armenian Beggar from Van (Srabian), 133–​ 134, 134 antiquity: paintings of domestic life in the ancient world, 97–​100, 204–​ 205nn62,66–​68,70; role of, and redesign of public space, 92–​97, 202n49, 203nn51,52 A Pasture in Dives (Un herbage à Dives) (Auteroche), 81, 84 “The Appeal of Drawing to the Sultans” (“Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim”) (M. Sami), 72, 73 Arachon Basin (Basin d’Arachon) (Marcke de Lummen), 81, 81 archaeology and archaeological artifacts: as gifts, 92; obelisks, 92, 95–​97, 96, 203nn51,52; Osman Hamdi Bey and, 99, 160, 161; Ottoman bylaw (1869) taking control of export of antiquities from Ottoman territory, 99; Ottoman Imperial Museum and, 130, 161, 215n66; Western acquisition of, 99, 205n70 architecture: Dolmabahçe Palace in Beaux Arts style, 8; and non-Western regional modernisms, 179–​180n32; Ottoman baroque, 27, 27; Ottoman treatise on (1873), 164, 165, 222nn56,57; role of, in state ideology, 9–​10 Arditi, Luigi, Ode to the Sultan (with Zafiraki Efendi), 52, 190–​191n28 Ardzagank, 130, 133 Armenians. See Ottoman-Armenians art education in Istanbul, 5 The Artist at Work (Osman Hamdi Bey), 156–​ 158, 157, 159–​160, 161–​162, 165–​168, 167 artist-entrepreneurs: Chlebowski as, 13, 16, 181–​ 182n43, 189–​190n20, 220n35; defined, 13; hosting European Orientalist painters, 13, 181n43; Mary Adelaide Walker as, 13, 181–​ 182n43. See also transcultural aesthetics; transcultural exchange

Aivazovsky, Ivan, 212n40; Byron on the Island of San Lazzaro, 215–​216n69; Eyüp in the

Les artistes modernes (Goupil et Cie, publishers), 89

2 4 2    •   I ndex

artist-patrons: Abdülaziz as, 16, 56, 58, 72, 88; Abdülmecid as, 172–​173, 224n7 artists —​European expatriate, 6; expanding canon of European Orientalism to include, 12–​13; inclusion/embeddedness of, self-portraiture and, 19, 140, 141, 142, 143–​1 45, 148–​ 150, 217–​218n8; as intimate outsiders, 12–​13; organizing Istanbul exhibitions in the 1880s, 112–​113, 118, 131, 136; paintings in Istanbul exhibitions in the 1880s, 120–​ 122, 121, 126–​129, 127–​128, 136; and the resident picturesque, 126–​129, 127–​128, 213–​214nn56,57 —​local minority: and art in military training, 7; defined, 6. See also Ottoman-Armenians —​Ottoman Muslim, 5–​6; as government bureaucrats, 7, 12, 80, 137, 151, 153–​154, 153, 156, 161, 168, 169, 170; and importance of institutions in Paris, 137, 176, 176n7. See also Ottoman Aestheticism; Ottoman art —​See also easel painting; exhibitions; networks; self-portraits Art Journal (London), 209n15 Art Journal (New York), 89 Attack on the Fortress of Belgrade at the Time of Sultan Mahmud I (Chlebowski), 64–​65, 64 Aublet, Albert, Ceremony of the Howling Dervishes of Scutari (Cérémonie des derviches hurleurs de Scutari) (photogravure), 145 Augusta Viktoria, Kaiserin, 100 An August Night in a Swedish Port (Nuit d’août dans un port de Suède) (Wahlberg), 84, 87, 88, 200–​201n34 Auteroche, Alfred Éloi, A Pasture in Dives (Un herbage à Dives), 81, 84 avant-garde, 5, 11, 152, 169, 176n7 Bakić-Hayden, Milica, 14, 182n50 Balkanism, 14, 182n49 Barbizon school painting and its influence on Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 84, 88 Barré, Louis, Herculanum et Pompéi, 204n62 Bashi-Bazouk Dancing (Bachi-Bouzouk dansant) (Gérôme), 3, 102, 104, 105–​109, 106, 206nn83,87

“Bashi-Bazouks,” 104, 105–​107, 106, 206n87; as term, 107, 206n87. See also Zeybeks Basiret, 209n20 The Battle of Serdar Mehmed Paşa in Temeşvar (Chlebowski): painting, 58, 59; sketch by Sultan Abdülaziz [Sketch of a Rider], 58, 59 Battle of Varna (1444) [1865] (Chlebowski), 54–​ 55, 54, 192n37 Battle of Varna (1444) [c. 1865–​72] (Chlebowski), 54–​55, 55, 192n37 Battle of Vienna (Chlebowski), 69–​71, 71 battle painting cycle, as collaboration between Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz: anachronisms in, 192n37; calligraphic inscriptions, 2, 11, 62, 63, 64, 193n44; collaborative working process, 56, 192–​193nn39,40; divergent sensibility in, 1–​2; and European history painting, 66; European/Orientalist perception of, 2, 39; European visit by Abdülaziz and, 52–​53; Gérôme’s comment about adverse effect of Sultan’s approach to painting on Chlebowski’s art, 62; historiography and, 16, 66, 194n51; hybrid visual language of, 2, 16, 64; and illustrated manuscripts, tradition of, 64; and modern art narrative, Ottoman/Turkish, 2–​3, 39, 72; networked objects, sketches as, 16, 39, 72; Ottoman perception of, 2–​3, 39, 72; Alberto Pasini’s comment about adverse effect of Sultan’s approach to painting on Chlebowski’s art, 193n43; and Polish history painting, 16, 39, 55, 69–​71, 70– ​71, 195–​196nn58–​63; publication of sketches, 2, 39, 72, 196nn64,65; “School of Chlebowski” and attribution of, 55, 192n38; signature in Ottoman, Chlebowski’s, 64, 193n45; the Sultan’s sketches in Polish and Turkish museums, 37–​38, 191n34. See also battle painting cycle, compositional drawings by Chlebowski; battle painting cycle, paintings by Chlebowski; battle painting cycle, sketches by Sultan Abdülaziz battle painting cycle, compositional drawings by Chlebowski: The Mora Rebellion, 1–​2, 2, 56, 58; The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, 56, 57, 193n40

I ndex

   •   2 43

battle painting cycle, paintings by Chlebowski: Attack on the Fortress of Belgrade at the Time of Sultan Mahmud I, 64–​65, 64; The Battle of Serdar Mehmed Paşa in Temeşvar, 58, 59; Battle of Varna (1444) [1865], 54–​ 55, 54, 192n37; Battle of Varna (1444) [c. 1865–​72], 54–​55, 55, 192n37; The Mora Rebellion, 56, 58, 58; The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress, 58, 60; The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, 56, 57; The Siege of the Fortress of Semendre, 58, 61; Sultan Mehmed III at the Battle of Eğri, 65, 65 battle painting cycle, sketches by Sultan Abdülaziz: for The Battle of Serdar Mehmed Paşa in Temeşvar [Sketch of a Rider], 58, 59; calligraphic inscriptions, 62, 63, 64, 193n44; for The Mora Rebellion (corrections), 1, 2, 56, 58; for The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress, 58, 60; Ottoman Fleet, 37–​38, 38; for The Pitched Battle of Mohaç, 56, 56; for The Siege of the Fortress of Semendre [Battle Sketch], 58, 61, 193n42 Baudelaire, Charles, 171–​172, 223–​224n6 Beaux Arts style, 8 Bellini, Gentile, Sultan Mehmed II, 15, 20, 21 Benjamin, Roger, 17, 135 Bérard, Évremond de, 190n27 Berger, John, 11, 84, 154 Berggren, Guillaume: Constantinople—​Turkish House Interior [fig. 113], 157–​158, 158; Constantinople—​Turkish House Interior [fig. 114], 157–​158, 159 Beylerbeyi Palace, inauguration of, and four unlocated group portraits, 39, 44–​45, 72, 194n54 Boğos Şaşyan, 222n56 book, Ottoman art of, 16, 64 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, Italian Women at the Fountain (Italiennes à la fontaine), 89, 89 Boulanger, Gustave-Clarence Rodolphe: as fashionable, 89–​90, 92, 109, 207n97; Le passage du gué, 109, 110, 115, 116; Pompeian Interior (The Gynaeceum), 81, 82, 89–​90, 97–​99, 100; sources used by, 204–​205nn62,67; as teacher of Şeker Ahmed Paşa, 17, 151, 183n56

2 4 4    •   I ndex

boundary formation around a mobile, temporary center of power, 22–​23, 31, 33, 35–​36 Bozdoğan, Sibel, 10–​12, 179–​180n32 Browne, Henriette, hosted by Walker in Istanbul, 13, 181–​182n43 Bull and Picador (Tareau et picador) (Gérôme), 79, 80 Bursa: and Ottoman cultural patrimony, 122–​ 126, 123, 129, 212–​213nn45,42; restoration of, 79, 158–​159, 199n19, 220n36 Burton, Richard, 148, 149 Buttura, Antoine, 78, 79, 198nn16,17 Byron, Lord: and Armenian culture, 131, 133, 215–​216n69; copies and prints of Eastlake’s Byron’s Dream, 131, 131, 132, 133; “The Dream,” 131, 215n67 Byron on the Island of San Lazzaro (Aivazovsky), 215–​216n69 Byron’s Dream (Eastlake), 131, 131, 132, 215nn67,68; copy by Mgrdich Givanian, 131, 131, 132, 133; engraving after, by James T. Willmore, 131, 132 Cabanel, Alexandre, Florentine Poet, 200n28 calligraphy and calligraphic inscriptions: and battle painting cycle, 2, 11, 62, 63, 64, 193n44; continuity of inscriptions on battle paintings with Ottoman miniature painting tradition, 11, 193n44; and Ottoman-Armenian artists, 118; and Ottoman Sultans (Chlebowski), 66–​67, 67; Fausto Zonaro and desire for correctness in, 149 Cannadine, David, 52 cartes de visite: in Czaykowska album, 37, 38; version reproduced from Young Album, 15, 33–​35, 34, 36 Cartes-de-visite of the Young Album (Abdullah Frères), 15, 33–​35, 34, 36 Castle of Asia on the Bosphorus (Robertson), 126, 127 Cattell, A. G., 89–​90 Çelik, Zeynep, 8, 18, 94–​95, 118, 136 censorship of exhibitions, 134–​135 Ceremony of the Howling Dervishes of Scutari (Cérémonie des derviches hurleurs de Scutari) (photogravure by Goupil et Cie after Albert Aublet), 145

Cey, Edouard, 79–​80, 199–​200n25 Cezar, Mustafa, 114, 219n31 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 13 Chambers, Iain, 14 Chaplin, Charles Joshua, Roses of May (Roses de mai), 81, 83, 88, 89 Chlebowski, Stanisław: as artist-entrepreneur, 13, 16, 181–​182n43, 189–​190n20, 220n35; cosmopolitanism of, 223n1; as court painter, 37, 37; displaying Islamic and European art on the walls of his Istanbul home and studio, 220n35; and Goupil et Cie consignments, 79–​80, 197–​198n14, 199–​200nn25,30; hosting Gérôme in Istanbul, 13, 77–​79, 181n43, 197–​ 199nn6,12,14,16–​18,20; and patronage network, Ottoman, 37, 39; payment for Ottoman palace work, dispute over, 194–​ 195n56, 200n30; and Polish nationalism, 16, 39, 55, 69–​71, 70– ​71, 195–​196nn58–​ 63; return to Europe, 69, 194–​195n56, 197–​198n14. Works: Battle of Vienna, 69–​71, 71; Entry of Sultan Mehmed II into Constantinople, 62, 62, 181–​182n43, 193n43; “The First Regiment of Foot Soldiers,” 42, 43; The First Siege of Vienna, 69, 70; group portrait paintings (unlocated, Fuad Paşa commission), and sketches for, 39–​45, 40–​4 4, 71–​72, 188–​189nn11–​ 15, 194n54; Ottoman Sultans, 66–​67, 67, 194n52; Sultan Abdülaziz (miniature), 47, 189–​190n20; Sultan Abdülaziz in the Topkapı Palace Courtyard, 45, 46. See also battle painting cycle, as collaboration between Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz; Chlebowski, Stanisław, group portraiture by Chlebowski, Stanisław, group portraiture by: Fuad Paşa commission (unlocated paintings, sketches for), 39, 41, 45–​46, 71–​72; importance of, 39, 45; Ottoman Sultans, 66–​67, 67, 194n52; Sultan Abdülaziz in the Topkapı Palace Courtyard, 45, 46; “Voyage of H. M. the Empress—​ Constantinople—​Reception by H. M. of the Diplomatic Corps in the Great Hall of the Beylerbeyi Palace—​after a sketch by M. Chlebowski,” 67–​68, 68

Christians in Ottoman Empire, alliances with Europe and treatment of, 30 Çinili Köşk, 159, 161 Circassian Girl Serving Coffee (Serviçen), 120 Claretie, Jules, 93, 98, 203n55 Clark, T. J., 12, 181n40 Clayson, Hollis, 202–​203n50 Çoker, Adnan, 210n24 Constantinople from the Bosporus (Pears), 126, 127 Constantinople Messenger, 111, 113, 118, 134–​135, 211n33, 221–​222n51 Constantinople of Today (Gautier), 126, 127 Constantinople—​Turkish House Interior [fig. 113] (Berggren), 157–​158, 158 Constantinople—​Turkish House Interior [fig. 114] (Berggren), 157–​158, 159 Coomans, Pierre Olivier Joseph: Rewards (Récompenses), 97– ​98, 97, 99; sources used by, 204–​205nn62,67 costume/dress/uniforms: ethnic, as painting subject, 133; the fez, 151; military reform, 139, 139; Ottoman costume book (1873), 164–​165, 222–​223nn55,60; women’s, and analogy with Ottoman architectural ornament, 164–​165; women’s hybrid dress, 172, 173; Zeybek, and cultural patrimony, 107–​109, 108 Cot, Pierre-Auguste, Springtime (Printemps), 90, 90– ​91, 201–​202n43 Courbet, Gustave, 92 Cox, Samuel, 200–​201n34 cross-cultural aesthetics. See transcultural aesthetics cross-cultural exchange. See transcultural exchange cultural institutions: and artistic identity, 168–​ 169, 169; importance of, 5, 176n7; and influence as focus, vs. collaborative networks, 7; later introduction in Istanbul, 5, 7; Ottoman Imperial Museum, 99, 130, 159–​160, 161, 220n38 cultural patrimony: diversity of, 105–​110; Osman Hamdi Bey and reclaiming of, 158–​161, 220nn36,38, 221n45; Ottomanism and claiming of, 9, 107–​ 109, 108, 122–​126, 123, 129, 212–​213n45, 213

I ndex

   •   2 45

Curtis, Charles, 113 Czaykowska, Seweryna Szembek, album of, 2, 37–​38, 38. See also battle painting cycle, as collaboration between Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz Dagbladet, 120, 122 Dainotto, Roberto M., 14, 182n47 Daubigny, Charles, 92 Death of Nelson (Maclise), 52–​53, 53 Degas, Edgar, Place de la Concorde (Viscount Lepic and His Daughters Crossing the Place de la Concorde), 92, 93, 202–​203n50 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 14, 175–​176n5 Demirsar, V. Belgin, 159 Denny, Walter, 196–​197n3 Deringil, Selim, 9, 139, 141 Derrida, Jacques, 14 Dervishes (Fausto Zonaro), 141, 143–​1 45, 143, 148, 148–​1 49 devotional effect, Osman Hamdi Bey and, 123–​ 126, 123–​125, 213n48 diplomacy: and Abdülaziz’s European visit, 47–​ 52, 190n22; establishment of Ottoman embassies, 26; expatriate support for 1880s exhibitions in Istanbul, 112–​113, 118, 131, 136; as focus of foreign policy, 7–​ 8; and gifts of archaeological artifacts, 92; royal portraiture and tradition of diplomatic gift exchange, 10, 15, 22–​23, 24–​26, 29–​30, 31, 33, 36, 176–​177n8, 186n19; soft power of, 29–​39; strategic use of palace art collection for, 100, 101; visual culture as articulation of, 9, 29–​30, 35–​36, 67–​68 Disraeli, Benjamin, 106 Dolmabahçe Palace, architectural style of, 8. See also Ottoman palace art collection Dombrowski, André, 202–​203n50 domestic furnishings, eclectic mix of, 160 Downey, William: portrait photograph of Sultan Abdülhamid II (London 1867) and its later unofficial use, 73; Sultan Abdülaziz, 50– ​51, 50 “The Dream” (Byron), 131, 215n67 dress. See costume/dress/uniforms dual threat to Ottoman Empire of Western European imperial powers and internal nationalist movements: Armenian cul-

2 46   •   I ndex

tural revival and nationalism and, 130, 133, 215n66; and dress reform, 107–​109; nationalist uprising in Egypt and censorship of the 1882 Istanbul exhibition, 135; and Ottomanism, 7, 9, 111–​112, 129; and subject matter of Chlebowski’s battle painting cycle, 66. See also OttomanArmenians Dubois, François, Parade of Asâkir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye (Victorious Troops of Muhammad), 95, 96, 97 Duran, Feyhaman, 169 Dürrüoğlu, Ayhan, 200n31 easel painting: as enmeshed in political processes and military institutions, 7; figural representation, as controversial, 8–​9; landscapes and, 8; and later introduction of art institutions in Istanbul, 5; miniature tradition and, 2, 8, 26, 64, 179n31; print culture and photography, as popularizing, 5; and range of claims and counterclaims about meaning of, 10. See also Ottoman art Eastlake, Charles, Byron’s Dream, 131, 131, 132, 215nn67,68 An Egyptian Café (Café égyptien) (Gérôme), 102, 103, 105, 206n83 Egypt, nationalist uprising in, 135 Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye (Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie) (Osman Hamdy Bey and Marie de Launay), 107–​109, 108 Eldem, Edhem, 99, 168, 205n70, 215n66, 219nn29,31, 221n45, 222–​223n60 Emre Aracı, 190–​191n28 Entry of Sultan Mehmed II into Constantinople (Chlebowski), 62, 62, 181–​182n43, 193n43 Ersoy, Ahmet, 108, 118, 120, 160–​161, 164, 222n57 Ertuğrul Cavalry Regiment Crossing the Galata Bridge (Fausto Zonaro), 139, 139 ethnographic representation, 133–​134, 134 Etruscan culture, 205n68 Ettinghausen, Richard, 196–​197n3 Eugénie, Empress, 67–​68, 68 Europe: cultural institutions and artistic identity, 168–​169, 169; dandy, 153, 156, 170, 218–​219n23; diverse and discontinuous

sense of, 14–​15, 182nn47,49,50; provincializing, 13. See also academic painting; artist-entrepreneurs; artists, European expatriate; dual threat to Ottoman Empire of Western European imperial powers and internal nationalist movements; France; Great Britain; Orientalism, European exhibitions: international (1878), loan from Ottoman collection to, 100, 102, 105; international state-sponsored displays, 135–​136; Istanbul, local and foreign audiences for, 5, 6, 113–​114, 118, 136, 210n27; newspaper reports and reviews of, 18, 111; of Paris, as Orientalist, 17–​18; private collecting practices as influencing, 156–​157; varied venues for, in Istanbul, 5, 176–​177n8, 212n40. See also easel painting; exhibitions in Istanbul in the 1870s; exhibitions in Istanbul in the 1880s, transcultural nature of; Ottoman art; Paris Expositions; Paris Salons exhibitions in Istanbul in the 1870s: amateur and student painters, 115, 209n19; institutional context of, 115, 209nn19,20; organized by Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali), 113–​115, 117, 152–​153, 208–​209nn11–​ 13,20; paintings of Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) in, 115–​117, 210n24; and Şeker Ahmed Paşa’s aspirations for the development of modern Ottoman art, 115–​118, 116– ​117; state-sponsored Ottoman pedagogic context of, 113–​114, 114, 117–​118, 208–​209nn11–​13; venue for, 6, 113–​114, 115, 208n12, 209n15 exhibitions in Istanbul in the 1880s, transcultural nature of, 17–​18; amateur artists and, 112–​113, 136; censorship of 1882 exhibition, 134–​135; ethnographic representation, 133–​134, 134; European Orientalist exhibitions distinguished from, 135; expatriate artists and, 120–​122, 121, 126–​129, 127–​128, 136; as expatriate initiative, 112–​113, 118, 131, 136; and geopolitical allegiances, claims and counterclaims about, 111–​112, 118, 120, 122–​126, 129–​130, 136; historical genre painting and, 122–​126, 129, 212–​213nn42,45,48;

networks and, 18, 112, 130, 136; and nodes of transcultural contact, 112–​113; Ottoman-Armenian artists and, 118, 120, 130–​134, 131–​132, 134, 210–​211nn28,29; and Ottomanism, exhibition as exemplar of, 118, 120, 122–​126, 129, 130, 210n27; power relations and, 112; and the resident picturesque, 126–​129, 127–​128, 213–​ 214nn56,57; state-sponsored Ottoman displays distinguished from, 135–​136; venue for, 115, 118 Eyüp in the Moonlight (Aivazovsky), 84, 86, 100, 101, 200–​201n34 Fatma Sultan, 120, 173, 224n8 fez, 151 figural representation, 8–​9, 115 “The First Regiment of Foot Soldiers” (Chlebowski), 42, 43 The First Siege of Vienna (Chlebowski), 69, 70 Fizelière, Albert de la, 100 Flood, Finbarr Barry, 10, 179n30, 196–​197n3 Florentine Poet (Cabanel), 200n28 Forest Light (Şeker Ahmed Paşa), 84, 85 France: and alliances with Ottomans, 29–​30; and audience for Pompeii interior paintings, 99–​100; diplomatic support for 1880s exhibitions, 113, 118. See also Paris The Friday Parade (Elisa Pante Zonaro), 140, 141 Fromentin, Eugène, 109 From the Harem (Osman Hamdi Bey), 164, 165 Fuad Paşa: and commission of four unlocated group portraits, 39, 41, 45–​46, 71–​72; as figure in group portrait (unlocated), 41, 41, 72; as key figure within Tanzimat bureaucracy, 72; and photography, 39; and web of patronage, 39 Fuller, Charles, 53 la Garde noble de S. M. I. le Sultan (Preziosi), 211n36 Gate of Felicity (Bābü’s-saʿāde), 45, 189n19 Gautier, Théophile: Constantinople of Today, 126, 127; on Rıfaî rituals, 142, 218n11 the gaze, 109, 221n48 Geertz, Clifford, 13–​1 4, 182n46 Gell, William, Pompeiana, 204n62 Germaner, Semra, 100, 218–​219n23

I ndex

   •   2 47

Gérôme (Strahan), 105–​107, 106, 206n83 Gérôme, Jean-Léon: and Abdullah Frères photographers, 79, 199n20; and Ahmed Vefik Paşa, 79, 198–​199n18; and Chlebowski as artist-entrepreneur, 220n35; collection in his studio, 156; comment about adverse effect of Sultan’s approach to painting on Chlebowski’s art, 62; encouraging Chlebowski to return to Europe, 69; errors in paintings by, 148–​ 149; hosted by Chlebowski in Istanbul, 13, 77–​79, 181n43, 197–​199nn6,12,14,16–​ 18,20; loan of works from Ottoman palace to Paris Exhibition (1878), 100, 102, 105; network developed in Istanbul, 79, 198–​ 199nn18–​20; newspaper reports of visit to Istanbul, 77–​78, 79, 102, 197nn4,6–​ 11, 198n17; Orientalism of, 105–​107; Orientalism of, divergent contemporaneous significance of, 17, 100, 102, 107–​110; and Osman Hamdi Bey, 79, 198–​199n18; Osman Hamdi Bey buying Gérôme painting for his father İbrahim Edhem Paşa, 220n35; Ottoman perception of works of, 77; in palace art collection, 3, 17, 88, 100, 102, 102– ​104, 105–​110, 108; and palace art collection, facilitation of Goupil et Cie painting consignments, 3, 79, 81, 88, 110; photogravures of paintings of, 105, 106, 109; and Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali), 3, 80, 81, 84, 151, 200nn30,31; sources used by, as disparate, 75, 77, 196–​197n3. Works: Bashi-Bazouk Dancing (Bachi-Bouzouk dansant), 3, 102, 104, 105–​109, 106, 206nn83,87; Bull and Picador (Tareau et picador), 79, 80; An Egyptian Café (Café égyptien), 102, 103, 105, 206n83; Lion in Its Lair (Lion dans sa grotte), 102, 102, 105; The Sabre Dance, 77; Sketch of Rüstem Paşa Mosque, 77, 78; The Snake Charmer, 17, 75–​7 7, 76, 79, 109, 196–​197n3 gift culture: diplomatic use of archaeological gifts, 92; diplomatic use of royal portraits, 10, 15, 22–​23, 24–​26, 29–​30, 31, 33, 36, 176–​177n8, 186n19; elite patronage and royal portraits, 45, 71–​72, 88

2 4 8   •   I ndex

Givanian, Mgrdich (Mıgırdiç), 131, 176–​177n8; copy of Charles Eastlake’s Byron’s Dream, 131, 131, 132, 133 Göksu (Sweet Waters of Asia), 117, 213n56 La Gondole Barcarolle (Sultan Abdülaziz), 52 Gören, Ahmet Kamil, 84, 154, 200n31, 218n20 Goupil, Albert, 156, 220n35 Goupil et Cie, after Albert Aublet, Ceremony of the Howling Dervishes of Scutari (Cérémonie des derviches hurleurs de Scutari), 145 Goupil et Cie and painting acquisitions for Ottoman palace collection: Chlebowski and, 79–​80, 197–​198n14, 199–​ 200nn25,30; contemporary art as focus of, 88; Gérôme as facilitating and overseeing, 3, 79, 81, 88, 110; Gérôme paintings in collection, 3, 17, 88, 100, 102, 102– ​104, 105–​110, 108; negotiation of, 79–​81, 84, 88, 102, 200n30; prices charged, 88; prints and replications of paintings prior to sale, 88–​90, 89– ​9 0, 100, 105, 106, 201–​202nn43,47; and the question as to whose taste determined the range of works purchased, 81, 84, 88, 100, 200n30; Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) and, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88; unsuccessful attempt to acquire Alexandre Cabanel’s Florentine Poet, 200n28 Great Britain: alliance with Ottomans, 29, 30; and Armenian population, 133; diplomatic support for 1880s exhibitions, 113, 118; and Egyptian nationalist movement, 135; end of support for Ottoman Empire, 105–​ 107, 112, 129 Greek Orthodox Church, as recognized by Ottoman state, 214n61 Greeks: ancient, 99, 205n68; independence of, 66; rebels, 66 Guattari, Félix, 4, 175–​176n5 Guillemet, Pierre Désire, 198n17; Portrait of Sultan Abdülaziz, 113, 114 Guys, Constantin, 171–​172, 173 Haddad, Michèle, 91–​92 Hakayik-ul Vekayi, 209n20 Halil Bey (Halil Şerif Paşa), 122, 202n46; collection of, 91–​92, 202n46

Halim Paşa, Prince, 120, 211–​212n38 Hanioğlu, Şükrü, 28–​29, 112 Haskell, Francis, 92, 202n46 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 93, 94 Herculanum et Pompéi (Barré), 204n62 Hering, Fanny, 105 Hippodrome (Sébah), 96 historiography. See Ottoman historiography Hobart-Hampden, Edith Katherine, 113 Hobart Paşa, 113 Ibn Khaldūn, 182n47 İbrahim Edhem Paşa, 105, 164, 222n56; his son Osman Hamdi Bey buying a painting by Gérôme for, 220n35 identity of artists: collective, of avant-garde, 18, 169; cultural institutions as valorizing, 168–​169, 169; multivalent, 4; of Osman Hamdi Bey, 18, 161, 168, 169, 170; of Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) as modern Ottoman gentleman, 18, 150, 151–​154, 156, 170, 219n27; Fausto Zonaro as complicating Orientalist, 19, 138, 148, 150, 170 identity, of Ottoman-Armenians, 118, 120, 130, 133, 210–​211nn28,29, 214n63 Illustrated London News, 49, 126, 173, 221–​ 222n51 L’Illustration, Journal Universel, 68, 68, 95 imaginative geography, as transcultural field, 35 imagined community, 22, 33 İnankur, Zeynep, 100, 218–​219n23 inscriptions. See calligraphy and calligraphic inscriptions In the Tomb of the Princes (Osman Hamdi Bey), 160–​161 intimate outsiders, 12–​13. See also transcultural aesthetics The Investiture of Sultan Abdülaziz I with the Order of the Garter, 17 July 1867 (Thomas), 52, 190n27 Islam: ceremonies open to non-Muslims, 141–​1 42, 144, 217–​218nn8,11; commodification of culture of, 156–​158, 158–​159, 220n35; pan-Islamism, 7, 139, 141 Istanbul: art public in, as local and foreign, 5, 6, 113–​114, 118, 136, 210n27; as contact zone, 112, 176–​177n8; as cosmopolitan

city, 8, 126; and modernizing experiments, 8; Orientalist city view paintings in Ottoman and later in Turkish collections, 93–​94; Pera district, 8, 176–​177n8; as safe haven for Polish exiles, 71, 195–​ 196n63; urban renewal of, 94–​97 Italian Women at the Fountain (Italiennes à la fontaine) (Bouguereau), 89, 89 Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, 69–​70, 195n62 Janissaries, 30, 32, 70 Jerichau-Baumann, Elisabeth, 120, 211–​ 212nn38,40 Jerichau, Harald, 211–​212nn38,40; Caravan at Sunrise, 211–​212n38; Street in Istanbul, 211–​212n38; Sunset over the Bosporus, 211–​212n38 Jeune émir à l’étude (Osman Hamdi Bey), 162, 221n50 Jews, as millet recognized by Ottoman state, 214n61 journalism/media: and Abdülaziz’s visit to Europe, 47, 49–​50, 49, 52, 94, 95; and art censorship, 134–​135; and art exhibitions in Istanbul, 18, 111; art reviewing in nineteenth-century Istanbul as sporadic, 5; awareness of art-world events in Paris, 197n9; and Beylerbeyi Palace inauguration, 44; and Empress Eugénie’s visit to Istanbul, 67–​68, 68; and Gérôme’s visit to Istanbul, 77–​78, 79, 102, 197nn4,6–​11, 198n17; and Ottoman-Armenians in art exhibitions, 130, 133, 134; on palace art collection, 88; and Mary Adelaide Walker as key art teacher, 120, 211n33. See also Ardzagank; Art Journal (London); Art Journal (New York); Basiret; Constantinople Messenger; Dagbladet; Hakayik-ul Vekayi; Illustrated London News; La Turquie; Levant Herald; L’Illustration, Journal Universel; Masis; Moniteur; Osmanlı; Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi; Tercüman– ​ı Ahval; Times (London) Journal mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1875–​1878 (Goncourt and Goncourt), 198n17

I ndex

   •   2 49

Kami Bey, 148–​1 49 Kapıdağlı, Kostantin: Schiavonetti engraving based on portrait by, 24, 25; Sultan Selim III in Audience, 45, 46; Young Album based on portraits by, 23, 26, 31 Kara Mustafa, 70 Karatepe, İlkay, 192n38 Kargopoulo, Vassilaki, Tomb of Sultan Mahmud II, 6, 113–​114 Kebir Musavver Silsilenâme (Levnî), 26 Khachaturian, Lisa, 214n63 Khave Ocağı (Osman Hamdi Bey), 162 King Jan III Sobieski Presenting Canon Denhoff with a Letter to the Pope (Matejko), 195n62 Kıyâfetü’l-insaniye fî Şemâ’il’ül-Osmaniye (Human Physiognomy Concerning the Personal Dispositions of the Ottomans, 1579) (Lokman), 26 Köçeoğlu, Krikor, 118, 120 la Garde noble de S. M. I. le Sultan (Preziosi), 211n36 Laleli Mosque, 27 landscapes: expatriate artists and the resident picturesque, 126–​129, 127–​128, 213–​ 214nn56,57; Ottoman palace art collection and, 84, 84– ​87, 88, 203n56; Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) and, 84, 85–​87, 88, 117, 154–​155, 155; and transition from miniatures to easel painting, 8 La Place de la Concorde. See Nittis, Guiseppe de La Turquie, 114, 115, 197n8, 208nn11,12, 209nn19,20 Launay, Marie de, 164, 222–​223n56,60 Layard, Sir Henry, 113 Leighton, Frederic, 156; Self-Portrait, 168–​169, 169 Le passage du gué (Boulanger), 109, 110; copy by Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali), 115, 116, 117 Les Ruines de Pompéi (Mazois), 204n62 Levant Herald, 77–​78, 79, 88, 102, 197nn4,7,9–​ 11, 208–​209n13, 211n33 Levnî, Kebir Musavver Silsilenâme, 26 Lewis, John Frederick: The Commentator on the Koran, 124, 124; Osman Hamdi Bey compared with, 162, 221–​222n50,51; sketch of a solitary worshipper, 213n48

25 0   •   I ndex

Lieutenant Richard Burton in Arab Dress (Seddon), 148, 149 Lifij, Hüseyin Avni, Self-Portrait, 18, 152, 152 L’Illustration, Journal Universel, 68, 68, 95 Lion in Its Lair (Lion dans sa grotte) (Gérôme), 102, 102, 105 Louis Philippe, 52, 92 Luxor Obelisk, 92, 203nn51,52 McLaughlin, Raoul, 204n66 Maclise, Daniel, Death of Nelson and Meeting of Wellington and Blücher, 52–​53, 53 Mahmud II, Sultan (r. 1808–​39): dress reforms of, 151; legitimization of new military troops, 96, 97; photograph of tomb of, 6; portrait of, reputedly by Winterhalter, copy by Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali), 115, 210n22; portraits of, generally, 9, 115, 200–​201n34; Young Album copies shipped to, 31, 187n27; Young Album history of, added by Young, 32–​33; Young Album portrait of, 31, 32 Maillord, Eugène, 222n56 Makdisi, Ussama, 9, 99, 108–​109 Mammeri, Azouaou, 12 Marcke de Lummen, Charles Émile van, Arachon Basin (Basin d’Arachon), 81, 81 masculinity, Ottoman vs. Westernized dandy, 153, 156, 170, 218–​219n23 Masis, 130, 133 Matejko, Jan: King Jan III Sobieski Presenting Canon Denhoff with a Letter to the Pope, 195n62; Stefan Batory, King of Poland before Pskov, 195n58 Mazois, François, Les Ruines de Pompéi, 204n62 media. See journalism/media Meeting of Wellington and Blücher (Maclise), 52–​53, 53 Mehmed I, Sultan (r. 1413–​21), 122, 158–​159, 220n36 Mehmed III, Sultan (r. 1595–​1603), 65 Mehmed V, Sultan (r. 1909–​18), 148 Mehmed Şevki Efendi, 222n56 Mehmed the Conqueror, Sultan (r. 1444–​46, 1451–​81), 15 Meissonier, Ernest, 88 Members of the Central Committee of the Red Crescent, 119

Mevlevi dervishes (“whirling dervishes”), 141, 146, 218n11 military: “Bashi-Bozouks”/Zeybeks and, 105–​ 108, 206n87; legitimization via visual culture, 96, 97. See also military reforms military reforms: Abdülaziz and, 45, 66, 67, 72, 189n17; Abdülhamid and, 139, 139; easel painting and role in training for, 7, 177n12; Luigi Schiavonetti print symbolizing, 24–​25, 25; Young Album and symbolization of, 26–​28, 27– ​29 millets, 214n61 miniature tradition, Ottoman: cessation of, 11; John Frederick Lewis and, 162; Osman Hamdi Bey and, 162, 168; portraits of Abdülaziz, 45, 47, 47, 189–​190n20; portraits of Mahmud II, 115; in relation to easel painting, 2, 8, 26, 64, 179n31 The Miraculous Fountain (Osman Hamdi Bey), 160–​161 misinterpretation: and European Orientalism, 172–​175, 223–​224nn6–​8; and indigenous agency, 4 modernity of Ottoman head of state, photography signifying, 39 modernizing and centralizing reforms: and cultural heritage, 9; dress reform, 107–​108, 139, 139, 151; failures of, expatriate artists’ view of, 129; and hierarchical distinction of center-periphery relations, 9; as loss, 213n56; as selective process, 8; Selim III and, 26–​29, 30; and visual culture, importance of, 9–​10; as Westernizing but not Western, 8. See also military reforms; Orientalism, Ottoman; Ottomanism; Tanzimat Mohammed Chelebi, Sultan (Sultan Mehmed I Çelebi) (r. 1413–​21), 125 Moniteur, 209n15 Montani, Pietro, 222nn56,57 The Mora Rebellion (Chlebowski): compositional drawing, 1–​2, 2, 56, 58; painting, 56, 58, 58; sketch corrections by Sultan Abdülaziz, 1, 2, 56, 58 Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha (Mehmed Ali Paşa), 92, 211–​212n38

murals, transitional role of, 8, 179n31 Mustafa Fazıl Paşa, 212n40 Mustafa III, Sultan (r. 1757–​74), Sultan Mustapha Khan III: Twenty-sixth Ottoman Emperor, 26–​27, 27, 31 Mustafa IV, Sultan (r. 1807–​08), 31

Munn, Nancy, 22, 31, 35 Murad II, Sultan (r. 1421–​4 4, 1446–​51), 54

Nouri Bey, 88 novels, Ottoman, 153, 160–​161

Nakkaş Ali, 26 Napoleon Bonaparte, 29, 52, 185n10 Napoleon III, Emperor, 94 nationalism: European aesthetics and, 20; Polish history painting and, 16, 39, 55, 69–​71, 70– ​71, 195–​196nn58–​63 nationalist movements within the Ottoman Empire. See dual threat to Ottoman Empire of Western European imperial powers and internal nationalist movements; Ottoman-Armenians Nazlı Hanım, Princess, 118, 120, 122 Nead, Lynda, 213–​214n57 networked objects, 3, 16, 39, 72 networks: and art exhibitions in Istanbul, 18, 112, 130, 136; Gérôme and Istanbul, 79, 198–​199nn18–​20; mutually transformative effects of, 11–​12; and transcultural contact, nodes of, 112, 174; women’s pedagogical, 120 networks of patronage: elite (Chlebowski and Fuad Paşa), 39, 41, 45–​46, 71–​72; Fuad Paşa and, 39; Gérôme and Goupil et Cie, 3, 79, 81, 88, 110; royal (Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz), 37, 39; royal, and Istanbul exhibitions of 1870s, 114, 208–​ 209n13; Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) and, 3, 80–​81, 84, 175n3; as tradition, 7, 8 newspapers. See journalism/media Nittis, Guiseppe de, La Place de la Concorde, 81, 82, 88, 89, 202n48, 203nn52,55; and role of antiquity in redesign of public space, 92–​97 Nochlin, Linda, 17, 75, 107, 109, 196–​197n3 nodes, 4, 15, 112, 174; defined, 7. See also battle painting cycle, as collaboration between Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz; exhibitions; networks; networks of patronage; vectors; Young Album

I ndex

   •   25 1

Ode to the Sultan (Luigi Arditi and Zafiraki Efendi), 52, 190–​191n28 Old Tracks and New Landmarks (travelogue) (Walker), 126, 128–​129, 128, 213nn54,56 Orientalism, European: aestheticism of, compared to devotional effect of Osman Hamdi Bey, 124, 124, 213n48; artists hosted by artist-entrepreneurs, 13, 181n43; Balkanism and, 14, 182n49; Bashi-Bazouks, perception of, 104, 105–​ 107, 106, 206n87; canon of, expanding, 12–​13; center-periphery relations of, 9; and Chlebowski’s battle painting cycle, 16; collecting practices of, and Osman Hamdi Bey, 158–​159; contrapuntal readings and, 14–​15; critical reassessment of, 12; and domestic interiors of artists, collectors, and dealers, 156–​158, 158–​159; errors in paintings, 148–​150; ethnographic impulse and, 133; gaze of, 109, 221n48; of Gérôme, 105–​107; of Gérôme, divergent interpretations of, 17, 100, 102, 107–​ 110; Istanbul exhibitions distinguished from, 135; misrecognition and, 172–​175, 223–​224nn6–​8; nesting Orientalisms, 14, 182n50; in Paris exhibitions, 17–​18; patronage by sultans and Ottoman elites as complicating, 12, 172–​173, 224n7; reality effect of, 122; regional Orientalisms, 13; and Sufi dervishes as spectacle, 144, 145; and women, stereotypes of, 120, 122; Fausto Zonaro’s absorptive effect/immersion compared to, 144, 145, 148–​150, 149. See also Orientalism, Ottoman Orientalism, Ottoman: abiding tensions and contradictions within, 12; Arab territories cast as relatively backward, 9; defined, 9, 12; ethnographic sensibility and, 133; reception of Gérôme’s Zeybek painting in the Ottoman palace as a form of, 17; and Zeybek “native culture,” 108–​109. See also Ottoman palace collection, and significance of Orientalist paintings; View of Baghdad (Sitti Zübeyde Türbesi) (Osman Hamdi Bey) Orientalism, Sicilian, 14, 182n47 Ornamentalism, 52

25 2   •   I ndex

Osgan, Yervant, 130, 214–​215nn65,66 Osman Hamdi Bey: and academic realism, 115, 122–​123, 156, 160–​161, 162, 167–​168; aestheticism and, 161–​168, 221–​222nn49–​ 52,54; and archaeology, 99, 160, 161; Boulanger as teacher of, 17; as bureaucrat in Istanbul, 12, 137, 161, 168, 169; and the Bursa Yeşil Türbe, 122, 123, 129, 212n42; cosmopolitanism of, 160, 168, 171, 219n29; and devotional effect, 123–​126, 123–​125, 129, 213n48; dispersal of self and, 163–​164, 170; gender and, 161, 167, 221n48; and Gérôme, friendship with, 79, 198–​199n18; his studio and paintings of domestic interiors, 156–​158, 158–​159, 161–​ 164; historical genre painting and, 122–​ 126, 129, 160–​161, 212–​213nn42,45,48; identity as artist, 18, 161, 168, 169, 170; John Frederick Lewis compared to, 162, 221–​222nn50,51; Orientalist aestheticism compared to, 124, 124, 213n48; and ornament derived from natural forms, 164, 222n57; Ottoman Aestheticism of, 156, 162, 165, 167–​168, 222n54; and Ottoman costume book (1873), 164–​165, 222–​ 223nn55,60; and Ottoman treatise on architecture (1873), 164, 165, 222nn56,57; and Paris Exposition of 1867, 120, 121, 122; and Paris, importance of, 137, 176; signature of, 163; spatial ambiguities in works of, 11, 161–​163, 165–​168, 222n54; tiled patterning and, 162, 164; and transformation, 164–​168, 222n57; and women, paintings of, 124, 125, 161–​165, 168, 172, 173, 222n54. Works: After İftar, 162; The Artist at Work, 156–​158, 157, 159–​160, 161–​ 162, 165–​168, 167; From the Harem, 164, 165; In the Tomb of the Princes, 160–​161; Jeune émir à l’étude, 162, 221n50; Khave Ocağı, 162; The Miraculous Fountain, 160–​161; Prayer in the Green Tomb [1881], 122, 123; Prayer in the Green Tomb [1882], 158, 158; Türbe of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed, 122, 212n40; Two Musician Girls, 120, 121, 221–​222n51; View of Baghdad (Sitti Zübeyde Türbesi), 115, 116; Women in Feraces, 172, 173; Young Girl Placing a

Vase, 124, 125, 162–​164, 166, 222n54. See also Osman Hamdi Bey, transcultural aesthetics and his self-portrait Osman Hamdi Bey, transcultural aesthetics and his self-portrait, 156–​168, 157; as allegory for museum work, 161; as allegory of painting, 156, 161, 162, 166–​167; and cultural patrimony, reclaiming of, 158–​ 161, 220nn36,38, 221n45; date of, 156, 219n29; dress in, 166, 219n29; embedded self-portraiture, 161, 221n45; and European Orientalist collecting practices, 158–​159; and European Orientalist interiors, 156–​158, 158–​159; figurative painting in, 160; known only through photograph of, 156; as sociocentric, 169; studio furnishings, eclecticism and, 160; studio location for, as real vs. fictional, 156, 160, 219n31; wife-model for, 156, 166–​167, 170, 219n29 Osman I, Sultan (r. 1299–​1326): in Ottoman Sultans (Chlebowski), 66, 67; Young Album portrait of, 23–​2 4, 24 Osmanlı, Abdullah Kâmil review of 1880 exhibition, 111, 118, 120, 122–​126, 129, 130, 210n27 Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, 72, 73, 212–​213n45 Ottoman Aestheticism: defined as term, 162; of Osman Hamdi Bey, 156, 162, 165, 167–​ 168, 222n54 Ottoman-Armenians: Armenian cultural revival and nationalist sentiment, 130, 133–​134, 214n63, 216n70; artists and transcultural diversity, 118, 120, 130–​133, 215–​216nn67–​ 70; identity of, and compatibility with Ottoman imperial identity, 118, 120, 130, 133, 210–​211nn28,29, 214n63; in Istanbul exhibitions, 118, 120, 130–​134, 131–​132, 134, 210–​211nn28,29; as millet recognized by Ottoman state, 214nn61,62; and networks, 6; Romanticism and, 131–​133, 215–​216n69. See also Abdullah Frères (Armenian photography firm) Ottoman art: murals as transitional form in, 8, 179n31; and narrative of decline in histories of Islamic art, 10, 179–​180nn30–​33;

and non-Western regional modernisms, 10–​12, 181n40. See also architecture; battle painting cycle, as collaboration between Stanisław Chlebowski and Sultan Abdülaziz; easel painting; exhibitions; landscape; miniature tradition; networks of patronage; Ottoman Aestheticism The Ottoman Attack on a Fortress (Chlebowski): painting, 58, 60; sketch by Sultan Abdülaziz, 58, 60 Ottoman Empire: artists as bureaucrats in, 7, 12, 80, 137, 151, 153–​154, 153, 156, 161, 168, 169, 170; boundaries of, 7; craft revival in, 159; religious communities (millets) recognized by, 214n61; state-sponsored displays at European international exhibitions, 135–​136. See also dual threat to Ottoman Empire of Western European imperial powers and internal nationalist movements; military; modernizing and centralizing reforms; Orientalism, Ottoman; Ottomanism; Ottoman palace art collection; Tanzimat Ottoman Fleet (sketch by Sultan Abdülaziz), 37–​38, 38 Ottoman historiography, 186n19; and battle paintings Abdülaziz commissioned, 16, 66, 194n51; and Young Album, 15, 28, 30, 31–​33, 36, 186n19, 187n29 Ottoman Imperial Army Engineering School, 7, 177n12 Ottoman Imperial Museum, 99, 130, 159–​160, 161, 220n38 Ottomanism: and art exhibitions of 1880s, 118, 120, 122–​126, 129, 130, 210n27; and cultural patrimony, claiming of, 9, 107–​109, 108, 122–​126, 212–​213n45, 213; defined, 7, 107; and dual threats to empire’s territorial integrity, 7, 9, 111–​112, 129; as ideological buttress for empire’s territorial diversity, 112; non-Muslim Ottomans and, 118, 120; visual culture as vehicle for articulating, 9 Ottoman Orientalism. See Orientalism, Ottoman Ottoman palace art collection: city views, 82, 92–​97, 94, 96; contemporary art within,

I ndex

   •   25 3

Ottoman palace art collection (continued) 88, 91–​92; landscapes and, 84, 84– ​87, 88, 203n56; loan from, to international exhibition (1878), 100, 102, 105; Pompeian interiors, 81, 82, 97–​100, 97; strategic value of, for visiting dignitaries, 100, 101; tastes reflected in, and sultan as arbiter, 81, 84, 88, 100. See also Goupil et Cie and painting acquisitions for Ottoman palace collection; Ottoman palace collection, and significance of Orientalist paintings Ottoman palace collection, and significance of Orientalist paintings: contemporaneity of collection and, 92; cultural patrimony, diversity of, 105–​110; role of antiquity and redesign of public space, 92–​97; and scenes of domestic life in the ancient world, 97–​100, 204–​205nn62,66–​68,70 Ottoman Sultans (Chlebowski), 66–​67, 67, 194n52 Öztuncay, Bahattin, 68, 126 palace art collection. See Ottoman palace art collection Palace Interior (Abdullah Fréres), 101, 109 Pamuk, Orhan, 20, 184–​185n2 pan-Islamism, 7, 139, 141 Parade of Asâkir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye (Victorious Troops of Muhammad) (Dubois), 95, 96, 97 Paris: importance of, to Ottoman artists, 5, 137, 176, 176n7; Place de la Concorde, 82, 92–​95, 93, 96, 202–​203nn49–​52; as safe haven for Polish exiles, 71, 195–​196n63. See also Paris International Expositions; Paris Salons Paris International Expositions: of 1867, 94, 95, 120, 211n36; of 1878, 100, 102, 105 Paris Salons: of 1869, 117, 154, 210n24; of 1870, 117, 154, 210n24; of 1873, 90; of 1875, 88, 92, 98, 203n53 Parrocel, Joseph, 52 Parvillée, Léon, 199n19 Pasini, Alberto, 193n43, 195n58 patronage by sultans and elites, as complicating European Orientalism, 12

Pera district of Istanbul: as “contact zone,” 176–​ 177n8; as site for the Ottoman Empire’s experiments in modernization, 8 Persian court, and exchange of royal portraits, 185n10 Pesquidoux, Joseph Dubosc de, 105 photography: Abdülaziz as embracing, 37, 38, 39, 48–​52; Abdülaziz, portraits of, 45, 47–​53, 48– ​51, 73; Abdülhamid and, 10, 73; and articulation of Ottoman state, 9, 10, 39; as popularizing easel painting, 5; and widespread dissemination of images, 45, 47, 68, 73 The Pitched Battle of Mohaç (Chlebowski): compositional drawing, 56, 57, 193n40; painting, 56, 57; sketch by Sultan Abdülaziz, 56, 56 Place de la Concorde (Viscount Lepic and His Daughters Crossing the Place de la Concorde) (Degas), 92, 93, 202–​203n50 La Place de la Concorde. See Nittis, Guiseppe de Poland: history painting and nationalism, 16, 39, 55, 69–​71, 70– ​71, 195–​196nn58–​63; hussars, 69–​70, 71, 195n61 Polychromatic Tile Panels (c. 1575) from the Imperial Baths, Installed in the Altın Yol, Topkapı Palace (Abdullah Frères), 75, 76 Pompeiana (Gell), 204n62 Pompeian Interior (The Gynaeceum) (Boulanger), 81, 82, 89–​90, 97–​99, 100 Pompeian interiors, 81, 82, 97–​100, 97 Porterfield, Todd, 92, 203n51 Portrait of Sultan Abdülaziz (Guillemet), 113, 114 portraits. See Chlebowski, group portraits by; royal portraiture; self-portraits Prayer in the Green Tomb [1881] (Osman Hamdi Bey), 122, 123 Prayer in the Green Tomb [1882] (Osman Hamdi Bey), 158, 158 Preziosi, Amadeo, 93; la Garde noble de S. M. I. le Sultan, 211n36 print culture, 5; of Goupil et Cie, and paintings purchased for Ottoman palace collection, 88–​90, 89– ​9 0, 100, 105, 106, 201–​202nn43,47; and the resident pictur-

Pears, Edwin, 113; Constantinople from the Bosporus, 126, 127

esque, 126 provincializing Europe, 13

25 4   •   I ndex

Racim, Mohammed, 12 reality effect of Orientalist painting, 122 reforms. See military reforms; modernizing and centralizing reforms; Tanzimat religious communities (millets) recognized by Ottoman state, 214n61 Renda, Günsel, 26, 66 resident picturesque, 126–​129, 127–​128, 213–​ 214nn56,57 Rewards (Récompenses) (Coomans), 97–​98, 97, 99 Reynolds, Joshua, 169 Richon, Olivier, 107 Rıfaî dervishes (“howling dervishes”), 141–​1 48, 218nn8,10 Robertson, James, 113, 208n9; Castle of Asia on the Bosphorus, 126, 127 Roman Empire, and commercial exchanges across the Mediterranean, 99, 204n66. See also antiquity Romanticism, 131–​133, 215–​216nn67–​69 Rose Chamber Edict (1839), 8 Roses of May (Roses de mai) (Chaplin), 81, 83, 88, 89 Roumeli Hissar (Walker), 128, 128 Roxburgh, David, 157 royal portrait albums, Ottoman tradition of, 26, 185–​186nn15,19 royal portraiture: aggrandizement of rulers and, 30; and controversy over figural representation, 8–​9, 115; European portrait conventions and, 26; as genre, 15; as gifts in diplomatic arena, 10, 15, 22–​23, 24–​26, 29–​30, 31, 33, 36, 176–​1 77n8, 186n19; as gifts via elite patronage, 45, 71–​72, 88; international arena and use of, 9, 178n24; miniatures, 26, 45, 47, 47, 115, 189–​190n20; photographic, and widespread dissemination of images, 45, 47, 68, 73; photographic, of Abdülaziz, 45, 47–​53, 48– ​51, 73. See also Chlebowski, Stanisław, group portraiture by Russia: Armenian community within, 130, 214n63; Ottoman Empire alliance with Britain and, 29 Russian Embassy, and easel paintings, display of, 176–​177n8

Russo-Ottoman War (1877–​78), 105–​106, 112, 206n87, 216n70 The Sabre Dance (Gérôme), 77 Sadrazam İbrahim, 69, 70 Said, Edward, 14–​15; on Burton as paradigmatic Orientalist figure, 148; on legibility of writing in Snake Charmer, 196–​197n3; Orientalism, cover image of Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, 17, 75 Sailboats (Şeker Ahmed Paşa), 84, 87 Salons. See Paris Salons Sarayburnu (Aivazosky), 131, 132 Şaşyan, Boğos, 118, 120 Schiavonetti, Luigi, Sultan Selim III (after Kostantin Kapıdağlı), 24–​25, 25 Scifoni, Anatolio, Tepidarium Pompéien, 97– ​98 Sébah: Hippodrome, 96; photograph of Osman Hamdi Bey’s The Artist at Work, 156, 157, 167 Seddon, Thomas, Lieutenant Richard Burton in Arab Dress, 148, 149 Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali): Abdülaziz sponsoring studies of, 80; Gustave Boulanger as teacher of, 17, 151, 183n56; as bureaucrat in Istanbul, 12, 80, 151, 153–​154, 168; Gérôme as teacher and colleague of, 3, 80, 81, 84, 151, 200nn30,31; and Goupil et Cie painting consignments for the Ottoman palace, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 117, 153; in Istanbul 1870s exhibitions, 115–​117, 210n24; as Istanbul 1870s exhibitions organizer, 113–​115, 152–​153, 208–​209nn11–​13,20; and landscape, preference for, 84, 85–​87, 88, 117, 117, 154–​155, 155; paintings of, as gifts, 176–​177n8; Paris academic training of, 113, 115, 117, 151–​152, 156, 170; in Paris Salon exhibitions, 117, 154, 210n24; and patronage networks, 3, 80–​81, 84, 175n3; signatures in paintings by, 154, 219n27; spatial ambiguity in works of, 11, 154–​155; and still life, 154, 155; transcultural aesthetics and, 54–​55. Works: Alemdağ Landscape, 117, 117; copy of Boulanger’s Le passage du gué, 115, 116, 117; copy of Sultan Mahmud II portrait (reputedly by Winterhalter), 115, 210n22; Forest Light, 84, 85; portraits

I ndex

   •   255

Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) (continued) of Sultan Abdülaziz, 211n36; Sailboats, 84, 87; Self-Portrait, 150–​156, 151, 218n20; Still Life with Catalogue, 154, 155. See also Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali), and transcultural nature of selfportrait Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali), and transcultural nature of self-portrait, 150–​156, 151; Ahmed Midhat Efendi and, 153, 218–​219n23; and dispersal of self, 154–​ 155, 170; distancing from role of palace bureaucrat in, 153–​154, 153, 156, 170; dress of Şeker Ahmed in, 151; and European academic portrait conventions, 151–​152, 156, 170; and identity as modern Ottoman gentleman artist, 18, 150, 151–​154, 156, 170, 219n27; and landscape, 154–​155; and masculinity, 153, 156, 170, 218–​219n23; photographic portraits contrasted with, 153–​154, 153; and professionalization of art, 152–​154; and self-representation through still-life paintings, 154, 155; as sociocentric, 170; and transformation, 150–​151, 152, 154 selamlık procession, 139, 139–​1 40, 141 Self-Portrait (1901) (Fausto Zonaro), 141, 142, 148 Self-Portrait (1910) (Fausto Zonaro), 146–​1 48, 147 Self-Portrait (Leighton), 168–​169, 169 Self-Portrait (Lifij), 18, 152, 152 Self-Portrait (Şeker Ahmed Paşa), 150–​156, 151, 218n20 self-portraits, 18–​19, 137–​138; and self hood dispersed across field of representation, 154–​ 155, 163–​164, 170; as sociocentric, 138, 150, 169–​170; transgressive bohemianism in, 18, 152, 152. See also Osman Hamdi Bey, transcultural aesthetics and his selfportrait; Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali), and transcultural nature of self-portrait; Zonaro, Fausto, and his transcultural self-portraits Selim III, Sultan (r. 1789–​1807): Abdülhamid displaying portrait of, 200–​201n34; deposition of, 30; as patron of Young Album, 15, 23–​2 4, 25–​26, 30, 31; reforms of, 26;

25 6   •   I ndex

Sultan Selim III in Audience (Kapıdağlı), 45, 46; Young Album portrait of, 26, 27–​29, 29; Young’s account of his reign, 31–​32 Sennett, Richard, 29 Serkis Balyan (Serkis Bey), 1, 45 Serres, Michel, 213–​214n57 Serviçen, Dr., 118, 119, 210–​211nn28–​29 Serviçen, Verjin, 118, 120; Circassian Girl Serving Coffee, 120 Seyyid Lokman, Kıyâfetü’l-insaniye fî Şemâ’il’ülOsmaniye (Human Physiognomy Concerning the Personal Dispositions of the Ottomans, 1579), 26 Shaw, Wendy, 18, 136, 161, 221n48 Sicilian Orientalism, 14, 182n47 The Siege of the Fortress of Semendre (Chlebowski): painting, 58, 61; sketch by Sultan Abdülaziz [Battle Sketch], 58, 61, 193n42 signatures: Chlebowski practicing in Ottoman, 64, 193n45; of Osman Hamdi Bey, 163; as rarely used in Ottoman Muslim culture, 219n27; Şeker Ahmed Paşa (Ahmed Ali) and, 154, 219n27 Sitti Zübeyde Türbesi (View of Baghdad) (Osman Hamdi Bey), 115, 116 Sketch of Rüstem Paşa Mosque (Gérôme), 77, 78 The Snake Charmer (Gérôme), 17, 75–​7 7, 76, 79, 109, 196–​197n3 Springtime (Printemps) (Cot), 90, 90– ​91, 201–​ 202n43 Srabian, Bedros, An Armenian Beggar from Van, 133–​134, 134 state ceremony: Abdülhamid and, 94, 139–​1 41, 139–​1 40, 148; and boundary formation around a mobile, temporary center of power, 22–​23; European, and Abdülaziz’s visit, 52, 94; and group portrait oil sketch for Abdülaziz by Chlebowski, 45, 46; and group portraits (unlocated) for Abdülaziz by Chlebowski, 44–​45; and history of Place de la Concorde, 202n49; and royal portrait gifts in diplomacy, 30; state ideology articulated through, 9; and use of visual culture by Abdülaziz, 16 Stefan Batory, King of Poland before Pskov (Matejko), 195n58

Still Life with Catalogue (Şeker Ahmed Paşa), 154, 155 Strahan, Edward (Earl Shinn), Gérôme, 105–​107, 106, 206n83 Sufis, 141–​1 48, 218n11, 218nn8,10 Süleyman I, Sultan (r. 1520–​66), 64–​65, 69–​ 71, 70– ​71, 195nn59,60 Süleyman Seyyid, 212–​213n45 Sultan Abdülaziz (Downey), 50–​51, 50 Sultan Abdülaziz (miniature) (Chlebowski), 47, 189–​190n20 Sultan Abdülaziz in the Topkapı Palace Courtyard (Chlebowski), 45, 46 Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan: Twenty-seventh Ottoman Emperor (in Young Album), 26, 27–​28, 28 Sultanahmet School of Arts and Trades, 115 Sultan Mahmoud Khan II: Thirtieth Ottoman Emperor (in Young Album), 31, 32 Sultan Mehmed II (Bellini), 15, 20, 21 Sultan Mehmed III at the Battle of Eğri (Chlebowski), 65, 65 Sultan Mustapha Khan III: Twenty-sixth Ottoman Emperor (in Young Album), 26–​ 27, 27, 31 Sultan Othman Khan I: Head of the Ottoman Imperial House (in Young Album), 23–​2 4, 24 Sultan Selim III (Schiavonetti, after Kostantin Kapıdağlı), 24–​25, 25 Sultan Selim III in Audience (Kapıdağlı), 45, 46 Sultan Selim Khan III: Twenty-eighth Ottoman Emperor (in Young Album), 26, 27–​28, 29 Sweet Waters of Asia (Göksu), 117, 213n56 Tanzimat: dress reforms, 107–​108, 107–​109, 139, 139, 151; edict ushering in, 8; Fuad Paşa and, 41, 72; Orientalist misrecognition of, 173; and “reinvention of tradition,” 160–​161; Selim III as transitional figure, 26. See also military reforms; modernizing and centralizing reforms; Ottomanism Tepidarium Pompéien (Scifoni), 97–​98 Tercüman-ı Ahval, 44 tevhidhane, as term, 141 thick description, 13–​1 4, 182n46 Thomas, George Housman, The Investiture of

Sultan Abdülaziz I with the Order of the Garter, 17 July 1867, 52, 190n27 Thutmosis III obelisk, 95, 96 Times (London), 49–​50, 52, 190–​191n28 Timur, Taner, 190n22 Tissot (French Ambassador), 113 Todorova, Maria, 14, 182n49 Tollu, Cemal, 154 Tomb of Sultan Mahmud II (Kargopoulo), 6, 113–​114 Topkapı Palace, 8; landscape murals in, 8; Snake Charmer sources and, 75, 77, 79, 196–​197n3; Young Album archived in, 23–​ 24, 31, 33, 187n27 Toulmouche, Auguste, 100 transcultural aesthetics: absorption (Fausto Zonaro), 143–​1 44, 146, 147–​1 48, 170; devotional effect (Osman Hamdi Bey), 123–​126, 123–​125, 129, 213n48; Şeker Ahmed Paşa and, 54–​55; text and image in battle paintings, 2, 16, 64. See also networks; Osman Hamdi Bey; Ottoman Aestheticism; Ottoman art transcultural exchange: and boundary formation, mutability of, 22–​23, 31, 33, 35–​36; contrary purposes of artworks and, 20, 21, 36, 184–​185n2; nodes and, 4, 7, 15, 112, 174; as operating in multiple directions, 20; and Roman Empire, 99, 204n66 travel writing, 126, 128–​129, 128, 213nn54,56 Troyon, Constant, 92 Türbe of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed (Osman Hamdi Bey), 122, 212n40 La Turquie, 114, 115, 197n8, 208nn11,12, 209nn19,20 Two Musician Girls (Osman Hamdi Bey), 120, 121, 221–​222n51 uniforms. See costume/dress/uniforms Üsküdar Şemsi Paşa—​T he Maiden’s Tower (Fausto Zonaro), 94 Üstad Osman, 26 Usul-i Miʿmari-i Osmani (l’architecture Ottomane) (Köçeoğlu and Şaşyan), 118, 120 vectors: defined, 7; and imaginative geography, 35; shifting cultural boundaries, 22–​23,

I ndex

   •   25 7

vectors (continued) 31, 33, 35–​36. See also networked objects; nodes; transcultural aesthetics; transcultural exchange Véron, Théodore, 98 Victoria, Queen, 52 Vienna Exposition (1873), 118, 161, 164 View of Baghdad (Sitti Zübeyde Türbesi) (Osman Hamdi Bey), 115, 116 “Voyage of H. M. the Empress—​ Constantinople—​Reception by H. M. of the Diplomatic Corps in the Great Hall of the Beylerbeyi Palace—​after a sketch by M. Chlebowski” (L’Illustration), 67–​68, 68

122; Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings of, 124, 125, 161–​165, 168, 172, 173, 222n54; pedagogical networks of, 120; special exhibition viewing hours created for, 118, 210n27 Women in Feraces (Osman Hamdi Bey), 172, 173 Wood, John Turtle, 99 Wrench, William Henry, 157–​158, 158–​159, 220n35

Wahlberg, Herman Alfred Leonard, An August Night in a Swedish Port (Nuit d’août dans un port de Suède), 84, 87, 88, 200–​201n34 Walker, Mary Adelaide: as artist-entrepreneur, 13, 181–​182n43; Fatma Sultan as patron of, 120, 173, 224n8; as member of organizing committee for the ABC club, 113; and women’s pedagogical networks, 120, 211n33. Works: Old Tracks and New Landmarks (travelogue), 126, 128–​129, 128, 213nn54,56; portrait of Sultan Abdülaziz, 120, 211n36; Roumeli Hissar, 128, 128 Walled Obelisk, 95, 96 Warlpiri, “Law truck,” 22, 35 Washington, Georges, 109, 200–​201n34 Washington, Rev. George, 112–​113 Western European imperial powers. See dual threat to Ottoman Empire of Western European imperial powers and internal nationalist movements; Europe; France; Great Britain Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 100 Wilkie, David, 172, 224n7 Williams, Samuel, 212n42 Willmore, James T., (after Charles Eastlake) Byron’s Dream engraving, 131, 132 Winterhalter, Franz Xaver, 115, 210n22 Władysław I, King of Hungary, 54 Wolfe, John, 90 women: dress of, and ornamental architec-

Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, 20, 36, 184–​185n2 Young Album: archived versions in Topkapı Palace, 23–​2 4, 31, 33, 187n27; and boundary formation around a mobile, temporary center of power, 22–​23, 31, 33, 35–​36; cartes de visite reproduction of, 15, 33–​35, 34, 36; Chlebowski and use of, as source, 66; commercial release in Great Britain, 30–​33, 36, 186–​187nn25,27–​29; commission of, 23, 31; continued customization by Ottomans, 33; contrary purposes of, 21–​22, 30–​35, 36; cost of, 30, 186–​187n25; dedication to the Prince Regent in the British version, 31, 33, 187n28; and diplomacy, royal portraits as gifts in, 15, 24–​ 26, 30, 31, 33, 36, 186n19; disrupted history of production, 30–​31, 36; frame story of project’s history added to, 31, 33; histories of sultans added to, and British historiography, 15, 31–​33, 36, 187n29; Kostantin Kapıdağlı portraits as source for, 23, 26, 31; military reforms symbolized in, 26–​ 28, 27– ​29; and Ottoman historiography, 28, 30, 186n19; patron of (Sultan Selim III), 15, 23–​2 4, 25–​26, 30, 31; redeployment of, within Ottoman culture, 33, 36; as transitional form, 26. Works in: Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan: Twenty-seventh Ottoman Emperor, 26, 27–​28, 28; Sultan Mahmoud Khan II: Thirtieth Ottoman Emperor, 31, 32; Sultan Mustapha Khan III: Twenty-sixth Ottoman Emperor, 26–​ 27, 27, 31; Sultan Othman Khan I: Head of the Ottoman Imperial House, 23–​2 4, 24; Sultan Selim Khan III: Twenty-eighth Ottoman Emperor, 26, 27–​28, 29

ture, 164–​165; dress of, hybrid, 172, 173; Orientalist stereotyping of, 120,

Young Girl Placing a Vase (Osman Hamdi Bey), 124, 125, 162–​164, 166, 222n54

25 8   •   I ndex

Young, John, 15. See also Young Album Yusuf İzzeddin Efendi, Şehzade, 113, 208n11 Zaccagnini, Giuseppe, 217n1 Zafiraki Efendi, Ode to the Sultan (with Luigi Arditi), 52, 190–​191n28 Zeybeks (sometimes called “Bashi-Bazouks” in the West), 104, 105–​109, 106, 108, 160, 206n87; as term, 107 Zola, Émile, 88, 98 Zonaro, Elisa Pante: The Friday Parade, 140, 141; in Zonaro’s Dervishes, 143–​1 44, 143 Zonaro, Fausto: as court painter, 100, 138–​139, 141, 142, 145–​146, 148, 150, 168; and errors in paintings by Orientalists, 148–​ 150, 173–​174; his paintings in palace art collection, 93–​94, 94; Italian government recognition of, 138, 217n1; return to Italy, 148, 150; and selection of paintings to display for visiting dignitaries, 100. Works:

Dervishes, 141, 143–​145, 143, 148, 148–​149; Ertuğrul Cavalry Regiment Crossing the Galata Bridge, 139, 139; Self-Portrait (1901), 141, 142, 148; Self-Portrait (1910), 146–​148, 147; Üsküdar Şemsi Paşa—​T he Maiden’s Tower, 94. See also Zonaro, Fausto, and his transcultural self-portraits Zonaro, Fausto, and his transcultural selfportraits, 138–​150, 142; absorption in, 143–​1 44, 146, 147–​1 48, 170; as allegory for the creative act, 146–​1 48, 170, 174; as complicating Orientalist artistic identity, 19, 138, 148, 150, 170; and dispersal of self, 170; and inclusion/embeddedness, 19, 140, 141, 142, 143–​1 45, 148–​150, 217–​ 218n8; Orientalist mastery and objectification of the East compared to, 144, 145, 148–​150, 149; position of the viewer and, 144, 147–​1 48; sociocentric self-portraits, 138, 150, 170

I ndex

   •   259