Artist · 4 prints
Osman Hamdi Bey Prints
About Osman Hamdi Bey
Osman Hamdi Bey was an Ottoman painter, archaeologist and museum director, born in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1842, the eldest son of the statesman İbrahim Edhem Pasha. Sent to Paris in 1860 to study law, he turned to painting instead, taking lessons from Gustave Boulanger and absorbing the influence of Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1881 he became director of the Imperial Museum, today's Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and in 1882 he founded the city's Academy of Fine Arts. He died in Constantinople in 1910.
Osman Hamdi painted in the detailed Orientalist manner of his French teachers, but he often showed Ottoman people as thoughtful and active rather than exotic. His best-known painting, The Tortoise Trainer (1906), shows an elderly man in a robe patiently trying to train tortoises, and is now at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. He also led excavations at Sidon in 1887 that uncovered the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus, and he wrote laws to stop antiquities being smuggled out of the empire.
Osman Hamdi Bey prints: reproductions of paintings by the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey, made between 1880 and 1906. The collection includes The Tortoise Trainer (1906), Two Musician Girls (1880), Young Girl Reciting the Quran (1880) and Scholar with Quran (1902).
This selection centres on figures absorbed in an activity: reading, reciting, playing music or training tortoises. The settings are detailed Ottoman interiors with tiles, carpets, inscriptions and carved wood, painted with close attention to fabric and pattern. The mood across the set is calm and thoughtful, and the people are shown as scholars and musicians at work.
The warm, detailed interiors suit studies, libraries, reading corners and living rooms, and The Tortoise Trainer works well as a single central piece. All prints are museum-quality reproductions, available unframed or framed with low-glare acrylic glazing, with free shipping and import duties covered.
