Lot 309: f - OSMAN HAMDY BEY TURKISH, 1842-1910

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

55 by 38 cm., 21 1/4 by 15 in.

oil on canvas

PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR

Acquired by the family of the present owner before 1900; thence by descent

Interior of a Mausoleum with a Figure Reading 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 the great academics Gustave Boulanger, Paul Baudry, and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Yet certain subtle compositional details set Hamdy Bey apart from his French contemporaries and the western Orientalists in general. In contrast to their often staged compositions, focusing on the sensational, the overtly exotic, the extreme, Hamdy Bey's pictures are painted from the point of view of one who had grown up in the Ottoman Empire, and exude a sense of modesty and understatement truer to what the East was actually like.

While the present work is clearly 'Orientalist' in the form of the polychrome tiles, the fine muqarnas mouldings, and the metal candlestick and huge candle which adorn the mausoleum, compositionally it counters the expectations of the nineteenth-century western viewer. Rather than focus on the mausoleum's magnificent tiled and draped tomb, which is only hinted at by its carpeted dais in the lower right, Hamdy Bey chooses instead to make the subject of his painting the quiet contemplation of the young man who has entered the room. He is portrayed not as the pious worshipper, but as a scholar absorbed in his reading of the Koran, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings, and leaning against a pilaster set against the tiled wall. Thus Hamdy Bey's strict and uncompromising technique is used to convey a remarkable sense of ease and informality.

Hamdy Bey was not only a painter, but a renowned archaeologist and museologist, and his probing intellect and interest in antiquity is reflected in the almost scientific observation of detail in the present work. On his return from Paris in 1869, he was posted to Baghdad to work under the newly appointed Governor of the city, and would have become well acquainted with the eastern reaches (present-day Iran and Iraq) of the Ottoman Empire. Certain details in the present work suggest that the place depicted is not in fact a specific mosque, and that Hamdy Bey may have used artist's licence to record in a single interior some of the architectural ornaments he saw during his posting and on his subsequent travels. The tilework, for example, is in the style that was current in Seljuk Anatolia (Konya) and Ilkhanid Western Iran (Natanz) in the mid-late thirteenth century, while the magnificent candlestick is a fine example of thirteenth-century cast brass metalwork from western Iran.

The present work is sold along with a nineteenth-century leather-bound portfolio of albumen and silver prints of a selection of Hamdy Bey's oil paintings, including the present work (fig. 1). The cover is embossed with the initials OH, suggesting that it may have been one of Hamdy Bey's own record books.