Osmán Hamdy Bey Sold at Auction Prices

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  • - Osman Hamdy Bey , Turkish 1842-1910 A Lady of Constantinople oil on canvas
    May. 30, 2008

    - Osman Hamdy Bey , Turkish 1842-1910 A Lady of Constantinople oil on canvas

    Est: £3,000,000 - £4,000,000

    signed and dated Hamdy Bey. '81 upper left oil on canvas

    Sotheby's
  • f - OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910
    Nov. 16, 2005

    f - OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910

    Est: £600,000 - £800,000

    PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN THE YELLOW DRESS 61 by 40cm., 24 by 15 3/4 in. signed and dated Hamdy Bey / f. 1881 c.l. oil on canvas LITERATURE Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Bati'ya Açilis ve Osman Hamdi, Istanbul, 1995, p. 762, titled Çarsaflanan Kadinlar, illustrated in colour NOTE The Yellow Dress is a masterful blend of western academic painting and eastern sensibility. Hamdy Bey was the first Turkish painter fully to embrace the western style of painting, and in terms of its representational finesse the present work bears all the hallmarks of his training in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme. Yet certain subtle compositional details set Hamdy Bey apart from his French contemporaries and the western Orientalist tradition in general. In contrast to their often staged or imagined compositions, focusing on the sensational, the overtly exotic, the extreme, Hamdy Bey's pictures are painted from the point of view of someone who had grown up in Constantinople. His pictures convey a remarkable sense of modesty and informality, and a very much truer impression of what life in Constantinople was actually like. The Yellow Dress is a case in point. While loosely conforming to the 'Orientalist' genre, it counters the expectations of the nineteenth-century western viewer. Women were often portrayed to promulgate Europeans' pre-conceived romantic notions of the East: as overtly kept women or as racy and sultry nudes in exotic-looking harems. By contrast, Hamdy Bey's paintings of women are delicately understated, and set in the modern world. Here, a virtuous young girl regards herself in a looking glass as she gets dressed to go out, her maid in attendance. Other than that she is of the privileged classes and well to do, her identity is unknown. She might even be one of the Sultan's favourites, but if so and if the elegant boudoir is part of the Sultan's palace, it is not obvious. Hamdy Bey was more interested in capturing the fashions and mores of his day, which he did with painstaking detail and accuracy. The interior in The Yellow Dress is not a romanticised figment of the imagination, but decorated in the French rococo style fashionable in Constantinople by the 1870s, complete with parquet flooring and the latest printed silk upholstery. The dress fashion, too, is revealing about changing tastes among Turkish women at the time. French fashions were beginning to replace traditional Ottoman costumes, although the translucent veil, or yashmak, was still worn in public. Here, the girl in the yellow dress is seen tying hers, her maid holding out in readiness the black kaftan worn over the dress. Nor is the calligraphic panel or levha hanging on the wall a random prop. Overlapping inscriptions, this one invoking Allah - Tawakkaltu bi-maghfirat al-Muhaymin: Huwa al-Ghafur Dhu al-Rahmah ('I have placed my trust in the forgiveness of the Protector: He is the Indulgent Merciful One') - were particularly popular in nineteenth-century Turkey, and were a way of demonstrating a calligrapher's virtuosity. Hamdy Bey, a renowned archaeologist and museologist, would have taken particular interest in levha panels, which are used to decorative effect in, for example, the Great Mosque at Bursa and the Eski Cami at Edirne, and in the tomb of Cem Sultan at Bursa, all of which were substantially re-decorated in the mid nineteenth century. In Girl Arranging Flowers (fig. 1), also of 1881, the same model wearing the same dress is seen kneeling on a similarly upholstered blue silk sofa to reach a vase of flowers on a wall bracket, while another painting, again from the same year, and sold in these rooms in 1995 (fig. 2), shows a girl fully dressed in a black kaftan and yashmak. Fig. 1, Osman Hamdy Bey, Girl Arranging Flowers, 1881, Istanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi 197D05102 Fig. 2, Osman Hamdy Bey, Portrait of a Lady, 1881, sold: Sotheby's, London, 14 June 1995, for £524,000 198D05102

    Sotheby's
  • OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910
    Nov. 16, 2005

    OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910

    Est: £120,000 - £150,000

    PROPERTY OF A FRENCH PRIVATE COLLECTOR BUTCHER OUTSIDE A DOORWAY BUTCHER OUTSIDE A DOORWAY 51 by 40cm., 20 by 15 3/4 in. signed and dated OHamdy 1878 u.l. oil on panel PROVENANCE Acquired by the present owner in the 1960s NOTE Although Hamdy Bey became best known for painting mosque and house interiors (see lot 230), this was not to the exclusion of more humble scenes of everyday street life. In this newly discovered work, he depicts a halal butcher, proudly admiring the carcass of a prize goat. Halal derives from the Arabic word for 'allowed'. It is the orthodox method of slaughtering and preparing meat as stipulated by shari'a (Islamic religious law). An oil study for this work, also dated 1878 and depicting the same gate but without a figure, is illustrated in Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Bati'ya Açilis ve Osman, Istanbul, 1995, p. 663 (fig. 1). Fig 1. Osman Hamdy Bey, The Worn Gate, Osman Kerman collection

    Sotheby's
  • f - OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910
    Jun. 15, 2004

    f - OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910

    Est: £100,000 - £150,000

    signed and dated Hamdy 75 l.l. oil on canvas

    Sotheby's
  • f - OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910
    Nov. 18, 2003

    f - OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910

    Est: £100,000 - £150,000

    SIGNED AND DATED (MAKER'S MARKS) signed and dated Hamdy Bey. 1881 l.r.

    Sotheby's
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