Looking in a Mirror,’ an oil painting by Osman Hamdi Bey depicting a young lady in an opulent interior, is among the highlights of Dorotheum’s sale of 19th Century Paintings on 2 May 2023. It will be offered as part of the auction week, along with Old Masters and works of art. The estimate of this 68 x 45 cm painting is between 1 and 1.4 million euros.

Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910) was a founder of modern Turkish painting and shaped Turkey’s cultural life in the second half of the 19th century more than anyone else. Trained in Paris under Gustave Boulanger and the famous history painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, he was a significant figure in the integration of the Ottoman Empire, oscillating between East and West, tradition and modernity. He was a pioneer in his roles as a patron of arts, museum director, archaeologist and guardian of the nation’s cultural treasures.

Tradition and modernity

In ‘Looking in a Mirror’ Hamdi Bey also mixes Western academic painting and Eastern sophistication. The present painting is undated but we can assume that it was executed in the 1880s as in this period the artist depicted women dressed in the fashion of his day in a number of works. This painting on canvas shows a young woman in her room regarding herself in a mirror as she gets dressed to go out. She appears to belong to a wealthy family and is wearing an ochre dress. She is seen tying her headscarf known as the Yemeni. Her black kaftan, an overcoat called Ferace, is lying on a large blue sofa upholstered in Çatma embroidered velvet from the town of Bursa. She is kneeling on an ottoman silk Yastik cushion. The room is decorated with a Kavukluk, an Ottoman Turban stand. The floor is covered by a Hasir mat.

Osman Hamdi Bey

was sent to Paris by his father, the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Edhem Pasha, to study law. However, he dropped out of his training and turned to painting, becoming a student in Gustave Boulanger’s studio. His first appearance at the Paris Salon was not as a painter, but as a painting: in the form of one of two works that Boulanger exhibited at the Salon in 1865, entitled ‘Portrait de Hamdy-Bey’. A year later, the subject himself was represented as an artist in the exhibition.

In Paris, the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme exerted great influence on Hamdi Bey in the early 1860s. The young Ottoman artist studied the opulent compositions of this famous painter fascinated by the Orient at the École des Beaux-Arts, where Gérôme taught as a professor of painting in 1864.

In 1867, three works by Hamdi Bey were shown at the Paris World’s Fair and awarded medals. At that time, Hamdi Bey was already considered to be one of the leading Ottoman painters.
At the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873, Osman Hamdi Bey represented the Ottoman Empire as Commissaire Général. It was the first major task entrusted to him by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the field of cultural policy. To mark this occasion, together with the Parisian artist Victor Marie de Launay, he published a 500-page study of the traditional dress of the Ottoman Empire. The book, enriched with 74 photographs, still offers fascinating insights today.

In 1881, Sultan Abdul Hamid II appointed him director of the “Museum of the Empire” in Constantinople and, in 1883, made him head of the Constantinople Art School. In 1882, Hamdi Bey founded the Institute of Fine Arts so that young Ottomans would not have to travel to Europe to study art.