Osman Hamdi Bey

Osman Hamdi Bey (30 December 1842 – 24 February 1910) was an Ottoman administrator, painter and archaeologist, regarded as the founding father of museology, archaeology and fine-arts education in Turkey. ¹

As director of the Imperial Museum from 1881 until his death, he founded what became the Istanbul Archaeology Museums and the Academy of Fine Arts, wrote the Ottoman antiquities regulation that stopped the smuggling of antiquities abroad, led scientific excavations at Nemrut Dağı, Lagina and Sidon, and painted some of the most famous works of Turkish art. ¹

He was born in Constantinople on 30 December 1842, the son of Ibrahim Edhem Pasha, grand vizier in 1877–1878. His father was a Greek boy from Chios, orphaned in the Chios massacre of 1822 and adopted by Grand Admiral Hüsrev Pasha, who rose to the Ottoman ruling class; his mother Fatma Hanım came from a family that had migrated from Isparta to Istanbul. Osman Hamdi was proud of his Greek descent and often mentioned it in educated circles. ¹

He went to primary school in Beşiktaş, then studied law, first in Constantinople (1856) and then in Paris (1860) — but he left the law for painting and trained under the French orientalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger, spending nine years in Paris, then the capital of fine arts. ¹

In Paris he witnessed Sultan Abdülaziz's visit to the 1867 Exposition Universelle, the first visit of an Ottoman sultan to Western Europe, and he met many of the Young Ottomans — though, the loyal son of a pasha, he took no part in their political activities. ¹

He returned to Constantinople in 1869 and was sent to the Baghdad Vilayet as part of Governor Midhat Pasha's administrative team. Back in Istanbul in 1871 as vice-director of the palace Protocol Office, he worked through the 1870s in the upper bureaucracy and was appointed the first mayor of Kadıköy in 1875, serving one year. ¹

He had exhibited three paintings at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. The decisive step came in 1881, when he became director of the Imperial Museum (Müze-i Hümayun): he developed the museum, rewrote the antiquities laws, created nationally sponsored expeditions, and built ties with institutions abroad, among them the University of Pennsylvania, which gave him an honorary degree in 1894. ¹

In 1882 he founded and directed the Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi), today the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, so that Ottomans could be trained in art without leaving the empire. In 1884 he oversaw the new antiquities regulation (Asar-ı Atîka Nizamnamesi), which banned the smuggling of historical artifacts abroad and claimed exclusive state rights over them. ¹

He conducted the first scientifically based excavations by a Turkish team: the Commagene tomb-sanctuary on Nemrut Dağı in southeastern Anatolia, the Hekate sanctuary at Lagina in the southwest, and Sidon in Lebanon, where his finds included the royal sarcophagi and the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus — thought to hold either Abdalonymus, king of Sidon, or Mazaeus, a Persian noble. To house them he began building the present Istanbul Archaeology Museum in 1881; it opened under his directorship in 1891. ¹

Throughout his museum and academy career he kept painting in the style of his teachers Gérôme and Boulanger, yet his Ottoman subjects, unlike most orientalist work of the day, are given active and intellectual roles — and he frequently painted himself and his family. ¹

His most famous painting, The Tortoise Trainer (1906), held the record for the most valuable Turkish painting until 2019: sold in 2004 for five million Turkish liras (about US$3.5 million), it was bought by the Pera Museum, where it hangs today. His Girl Reciting Qur'an (1880) broke the record again at US$7.8 million at Bonhams in September 2019. ¹

His publications include Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873, prepared for the Vienna Universal Exposition; Une Nécropole Royale à Sidon (1892), on his Sidon excavations; and the account of his 1883 journey to Nemrut Dağı. ¹

His parents were Ibrahim Edhem Pasha and Fatma Hanım; his painting teachers were Gérôme and Boulanger; and his administrative patron was Midhat Pasha, whose Baghdad team he joined and whom his own father succeeded as grand vizier. Of these, only Midhat Pasha has a record in this museum so far; his father is already listed in the museum's additions queue and awaits his record, so all are named here in prose. ^{1 2}

He married twice, both times French women named Marie — the second known as Naile Hanım — and had two daughters by the first marriage and three daughters and a son, Edhem, by the second, according to the article. ¹

His formal place relations recorded here are his birth, death and residence in Istanbul, and his residence in Baghdad during his posting there. ¹

This section sets out positions as the sources report them. It is not a verdict by the museum.

Scholars differ over his paintings. Trained by the masters of French orientalism and using its motifs, he is read by many as subverting the European orientalist gaze by giving his Ottoman subjects thoughtful, active roles; others read the works as documents within their tradition. ¹

The meaning of his most famous canvas is itself contested: The Tortoise Trainer is often read as a sarcastic comment on the slowness of reform and on his own work among his collaborators, while the historian Edhem Eldem identified its visual source in an engraving of a Korean entertainer printed in a French travel magazine in 1869, and the painting's significance remains unsettled. ¹

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