Coleção privada
OST - 41x51 - 1880
Vendido por £
6,690,362 (BRL 35,757,812).
The
kaleidoscopic nature of Osman Hamdi's biography – he was, at various times, a
bureaucrat, archaeologist, museum director, architect, poet, writer, and
musician - and his prominent position in both late 19th century French and
Ottoman intellectual circles have made him a controversial symbol of Turkish
nationalism and cultural reform in recent years. In his capacity as an
Orientalist painter, moreover, he has long been considered a curiosity within
the genre. Too Turkish for some, too French for others, Osman Hamdi and his
works have been framed by the politics of these debates. Singled out for
particular attention have been the artist's harem pictures, featuring one or
more women engaged in their daily indoor and outdoor pursuits. Interpreted as
both pointed commentaries on misconceptions about the harem institution in the
West and dependable documents from an "insider" from the East, the
actual details of these compositions have often been ignored. By returning to
their subject matter and the contexts of their origins, and setting trending
theories to the side, a more historical and informational understanding of
these pictures can be achieved. As one of the earliest yet most representative
of these harem images, Young Woman Reading of 1880 provides a particularly
important and revealing case in point.
Young Woman Reading, known more commonly as Young Girl Reading the Qur'an, displays many of the qualities for which Osman Hamdi became best known. The impeccably rendered dress of the kneeling figure and the decorative background against which she is set, rich in colour and Islamic designs, are virtual signatures of the artist, as is the startling clarity of the picture's highly detailed style. The precision of its surface, however, masks significant ambiguities at its core: The book that the woman has chosen, the direction of her gaze, and even the parting of her lips and the buttons at her neck, all serve to undermine our first impressions of the scene. What begins as a pretty harem picture, in other words, becomes a complicated and multi-referential text which addresses a variety of topical issues within the landscapes of Orientalism, 19th century art history, and aspects of the artist's biography itself. Through its transposition of British, French, and Turkish models, and its manipulation of their themes, Young Woman Reading demonstrates the unique nature of Osman Hamdi's Orientalism, and his artful game.
Osman Hamdi's artistic education began in Paris in the early 1860s, in the studio of Gustave Boulanger and under the probable influence of Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose art and presence as a teacher dominated the Parisian art world at the time. (One of the first Ottoman artists to bridge the artistic worlds of Turkey and France and to adopt the École's academic figurative style, Osman Hamdi modelled for Boulanger before formally enrolling as a student in his atelier). The impact of both of these masters is evident in the style and subject matter of Osman Hamdi's pictures, which mirror, in many respects, the Orientalist subjects that were so successful in Europe at the time. In the 1880s, the artist embarked on a series of harem pictures, one of the most popular and alluring of these themes. The mood and inhabitants of these storied spaces, however, in Osman Hamdi's hands, were significantly and meaningfully transformed.
In Young Woman Reading, the familiar eroticism of the harem has been tempered by the buttoned-up façade of the female figure and her compact, self-contained pose. Placed in the room like a flattened paper doll, her body becomes less seductive than decorative, and less corporeal than another colourful shape arranged against the patterned wall. This emphasis on the formal aspects of the composition, as well as the importance and intricacy of fabric and her dress, recalls the more modest harem pictures of the British painter John Frederick Lewis, whose celebrated and widely reproduced works Osman Hamdi may have known.
More compelling a visual comparison, however, is between Young Woman Reading and Frederic, Lord Leighton's Study (At a Reading Desk) (Sudley House, England), painted and exhibited at London's Royal Academy only three years before Osman Hamdi's picture was begun. The child in Leighton's work, the well-known model, actress, and performer Connie Gilchrist, looks intently at the open pages of an illuminated manuscript set upon a wooden stand. The Oriental carpet and other exotic details of the décor around her, as well as her long pink and golden silken dress, add a distinctly Eastern gloss to the scene, which would have been in keeping with Leighton's Middle Eastern interests at the time. (Leighton, along with the architect George Aitchison, famously designed an "Arab Hall" for his house in South Kensington in this same year, and decorated much of the interior in an Orientalist style.) Though Osman Hamdi would not have seen this work in London, he may have known it through reproductions circulating at the time.
Leighton's charming picture was one of many self-proclaimed "potboilers" produced to meet a high demand. Audience's appetite for sentimental images of women and children engaged in quiet domestic pursuits had escalated exponentially in mid 19th century Britain, with no indication of slowing down. Among the most popular of these works were representations of reading, in which the child's innocence and imagination were signalled by the nature of the text they had in hand. The didactic potential of these and other tomes was also frequently addressed, particularly with regard to religion, Christian doctrine, and the church; in addition to images of children reading the Bible and reciting verses as they went, specific works of fiction were included in many compositions, that overtly promoted its beliefs.
Pictures of girls and women reading would also have been familiar to Osman Hamdi in his adopted home of Paris, though the subjects were markedly more risqué. In the 1870s and 1880s in particular, with changes in the workforce and the pursuit of leisure time activities on the rise, concerns about female literacy, access to journalism, and the corrosive influence of certain books on impressionable young girls' minds, compelled a spate of painted images of liseuse, or women readers, in a variety of settings and styles. Among the works that crowded the Salons and gallery walls were those depicting women reading poetry, perhaps the most "dangerous" of the genres. With its concern for love and drama, poetry was seen to compel a more visceral type of study than other forms of reading required or allowed: slouched in mild abandon, lips parted in recitation of the verse, the female subjects of these pictures were decidedly more sensual than moral or benign.
In Osman Hamdi's transposition of this trend, an air of gentle provocation is maintained - though beneath a prim veneer. The young woman kneels in front of an open book placed upon an inlaid wooden stand. Her back is straight, her eyes are lowered, and her hands rest gently on her thighs. The covers of the book are protected by a delicately embroidered floral cloth, suggesting its value and the importance of its care. The book's elevated position, and the presence of a prayer rug (Turkish, seccade), implies that it is a religious text, most likely the Qur'an. So too, the similarity of the young woman's pose with that of other figures in Osman Hamdi's oeuvre, who are more clearly engaged in acts of pious devotion, and the sinuous arabesque of fragrant smoke emitting from an incense burner placed nearby, emphasize the religious aspects of the theme. As the noted scholar Edhem Eldem has observed, however, "[A] partial view of the open page says otherwise. The taliq calligraphic style displayed was not used for the Qur'an, and the few words one can decipher confirm this mismatch. On the last line, one can read 'az ān,' Persian for 'from this.' This would suggest a volume of poetry, but such a large format with only four lines of barely four or five words each [makes this] also highly improbable. In all likelihood, this is just 'decorative' scribble, meant for the artist's dominantly foreign clients. This interpretation is further strengthened by the fact that the word on the second line reads 'Hamdi,' [the artist's] name, a playful trick he often resorted to in order to insert his name in the Arabic script in paintings which he almost exclusively signed in French," (personal correspondence, 4 March 2019). The many modern references to this picture as Young Girl Reading the Qur'an, then, have been misleading, and our own preconceived perceptions must now change. Rather than an image of pious devotion, the artist engages slyly in a game.
The meaningful disjunction that Eldem observes in Young Woman Reading, signalled by the book, is discovered elsewhere in the composition as well. Its architectural details, accessories, and exotic fabrics and objets recur regularly in his works, suggesting that the relationship between documentation and imagination is more complex than it appears. (It is important to note in this context that Osman Hamdi's paintings were rarely if ever exhibited in his native Turkey, where such inconsistencies might have been more readily observed. Indeed, in addition to overlooking the architectural pastiches that characterize even the most compelling of his works, contemporary audiences in England and Europe seem not to have noticed the regular appearance of the artist and his family members in several painted scenes). The striking geometric pattern of the open window's metal grates, for example, is similar to those on the right-hand side of Women Strolling (1887, Yapi Kredi Bankasi Collection) and Women at the Entrance to the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed (Erol Kerim Aksoy Collection), as well as to that in Two Musician Girls, while the almost hypnotic expanse of hexagonal blue-and-white tiles, inspired by examples in local museum collections and by those observed in situ at the Topkapi Palace and the Green Mosque (Yeşil Cami) in Bursa, reappear in Four Slaves (1880, Erol Kerim Aksoy Collection), to similar dazzling effect. The woman's bright yellow dress too is a familiar presence in Osman Hamdi's works from this period, being featured in Gathering Lilacs (1881, Private Collection) and Young Woman Standing (1884, private collection). Its repetition creates an additional link between the subjects of his pictures, and alludes to an intriguing narrative thread.
The care with which clothing is rendered in Osman Hamdi's art is significant for reasons that extend beyond the pictures as well. Women's fashion in Constantinople had, since the 1850s, been in a state of evolution and change. French fashion magazines were widely circulated – even within the harem - and dresses were ordered directly from Paris or commissioned from seamstresses in Pera, in emulation of the styles. As elements of European fashion were selectively adopted and combined with traditional Turkish dress, a hybrid style emerged – one that did not conform to the exotic imaginings of European artists and travellers, and so was often omitted from their works. Osman Hamdi's numerous images of Turkish women sporting the actualities of indoor and outdoor dress, and the young woman reading here, are all the more important, then, for their honest observations of the changes that were taking place. (This is particularly apparent in Osman Hamdi's works from the 1880s and '90s, in which Turkish women's traditional tailored feraces, or outdoor cloaks, dot his canvases with newly introduced colours and zest.) Through such chronicling of sartorial realities, Osman Hamdi's pictures may be seen as both the project of a salvage ethnographer, keen to memorialize what vestiges might be left, and that of a journalist, on the frontlines of fashion and style.
Ironically, given Osman Hamdi's concern for topicality, as evidenced by clothing and by dress, the environments within his pictures are often timeless, motionless, and still. Based on various examples of Mamluk and early Ottoman architecture and pieced together from his extensive collections of photographs and prints, these collage-like vacuums conjure the mood of a museum, in which the viewer is a privileged and well-behaved guest. This impression is reinforced by the displays of local handicrafts and goods that exist inside their walls. Though also drawn from the artist's collections, or those he oversaw, the message surrounding them is clear: they are not for the acquisitive department store shopper, but for the "look-but-don't-touch," museum-going connoisseur.
Calm, cool, and collected, the emotionless remoteness of the figure in Young Woman Reading sends a similar message of restraint and reprimand. Her eyes are averted, her posture is stiff, and despite her lips being parted, they do not entice or tempt. Though her origins may lie in the harem pictures of Gérôme and Boulanger, and in contemporary images of female readers in Britain and in France, Osman Hamdi has transformed this woman into something very new. She is the anti-odalisque, the innocent child now matured, and the progressive Turkish liseuse. The artist's interest in this subject is gauged by her recurrence in his art, in various permutations through the years. The culmination of these images may be a painting of 1893, lost to a fire and rarely reproduced today. Here, a young Turkish woman lays on her stomach, stretched out along a low platform or divan. She is absorbed completely by her book, which seems, given her nonchalant comportment, to be a work of literature rather than the Qur'an. The Islamic features of the room in which she basks, as well the clothes she wears, recall the Young Woman Reading, and evoke a similarly modern harem theme. Rather than rejecting the conventional posture of an odalisque, however, or being nearly lost against a patterned wall, the woman in this picture embraces this role with all her lithesome being. Osman Hamdi's game of translation and manipulation, begun with propriety some thirteen years before, concludes emphatically with this reader, and her active, working mind.
Young Woman Reading, known more commonly as Young Girl Reading the Qur'an, displays many of the qualities for which Osman Hamdi became best known. The impeccably rendered dress of the kneeling figure and the decorative background against which she is set, rich in colour and Islamic designs, are virtual signatures of the artist, as is the startling clarity of the picture's highly detailed style. The precision of its surface, however, masks significant ambiguities at its core: The book that the woman has chosen, the direction of her gaze, and even the parting of her lips and the buttons at her neck, all serve to undermine our first impressions of the scene. What begins as a pretty harem picture, in other words, becomes a complicated and multi-referential text which addresses a variety of topical issues within the landscapes of Orientalism, 19th century art history, and aspects of the artist's biography itself. Through its transposition of British, French, and Turkish models, and its manipulation of their themes, Young Woman Reading demonstrates the unique nature of Osman Hamdi's Orientalism, and his artful game.
Osman Hamdi's artistic education began in Paris in the early 1860s, in the studio of Gustave Boulanger and under the probable influence of Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose art and presence as a teacher dominated the Parisian art world at the time. (One of the first Ottoman artists to bridge the artistic worlds of Turkey and France and to adopt the École's academic figurative style, Osman Hamdi modelled for Boulanger before formally enrolling as a student in his atelier). The impact of both of these masters is evident in the style and subject matter of Osman Hamdi's pictures, which mirror, in many respects, the Orientalist subjects that were so successful in Europe at the time. In the 1880s, the artist embarked on a series of harem pictures, one of the most popular and alluring of these themes. The mood and inhabitants of these storied spaces, however, in Osman Hamdi's hands, were significantly and meaningfully transformed.
In Young Woman Reading, the familiar eroticism of the harem has been tempered by the buttoned-up façade of the female figure and her compact, self-contained pose. Placed in the room like a flattened paper doll, her body becomes less seductive than decorative, and less corporeal than another colourful shape arranged against the patterned wall. This emphasis on the formal aspects of the composition, as well as the importance and intricacy of fabric and her dress, recalls the more modest harem pictures of the British painter John Frederick Lewis, whose celebrated and widely reproduced works Osman Hamdi may have known.
More compelling a visual comparison, however, is between Young Woman Reading and Frederic, Lord Leighton's Study (At a Reading Desk) (Sudley House, England), painted and exhibited at London's Royal Academy only three years before Osman Hamdi's picture was begun. The child in Leighton's work, the well-known model, actress, and performer Connie Gilchrist, looks intently at the open pages of an illuminated manuscript set upon a wooden stand. The Oriental carpet and other exotic details of the décor around her, as well as her long pink and golden silken dress, add a distinctly Eastern gloss to the scene, which would have been in keeping with Leighton's Middle Eastern interests at the time. (Leighton, along with the architect George Aitchison, famously designed an "Arab Hall" for his house in South Kensington in this same year, and decorated much of the interior in an Orientalist style.) Though Osman Hamdi would not have seen this work in London, he may have known it through reproductions circulating at the time.
Leighton's charming picture was one of many self-proclaimed "potboilers" produced to meet a high demand. Audience's appetite for sentimental images of women and children engaged in quiet domestic pursuits had escalated exponentially in mid 19th century Britain, with no indication of slowing down. Among the most popular of these works were representations of reading, in which the child's innocence and imagination were signalled by the nature of the text they had in hand. The didactic potential of these and other tomes was also frequently addressed, particularly with regard to religion, Christian doctrine, and the church; in addition to images of children reading the Bible and reciting verses as they went, specific works of fiction were included in many compositions, that overtly promoted its beliefs.
Pictures of girls and women reading would also have been familiar to Osman Hamdi in his adopted home of Paris, though the subjects were markedly more risqué. In the 1870s and 1880s in particular, with changes in the workforce and the pursuit of leisure time activities on the rise, concerns about female literacy, access to journalism, and the corrosive influence of certain books on impressionable young girls' minds, compelled a spate of painted images of liseuse, or women readers, in a variety of settings and styles. Among the works that crowded the Salons and gallery walls were those depicting women reading poetry, perhaps the most "dangerous" of the genres. With its concern for love and drama, poetry was seen to compel a more visceral type of study than other forms of reading required or allowed: slouched in mild abandon, lips parted in recitation of the verse, the female subjects of these pictures were decidedly more sensual than moral or benign.
In Osman Hamdi's transposition of this trend, an air of gentle provocation is maintained - though beneath a prim veneer. The young woman kneels in front of an open book placed upon an inlaid wooden stand. Her back is straight, her eyes are lowered, and her hands rest gently on her thighs. The covers of the book are protected by a delicately embroidered floral cloth, suggesting its value and the importance of its care. The book's elevated position, and the presence of a prayer rug (Turkish, seccade), implies that it is a religious text, most likely the Qur'an. So too, the similarity of the young woman's pose with that of other figures in Osman Hamdi's oeuvre, who are more clearly engaged in acts of pious devotion, and the sinuous arabesque of fragrant smoke emitting from an incense burner placed nearby, emphasize the religious aspects of the theme. As the noted scholar Edhem Eldem has observed, however, "[A] partial view of the open page says otherwise. The taliq calligraphic style displayed was not used for the Qur'an, and the few words one can decipher confirm this mismatch. On the last line, one can read 'az ān,' Persian for 'from this.' This would suggest a volume of poetry, but such a large format with only four lines of barely four or five words each [makes this] also highly improbable. In all likelihood, this is just 'decorative' scribble, meant for the artist's dominantly foreign clients. This interpretation is further strengthened by the fact that the word on the second line reads 'Hamdi,' [the artist's] name, a playful trick he often resorted to in order to insert his name in the Arabic script in paintings which he almost exclusively signed in French," (personal correspondence, 4 March 2019). The many modern references to this picture as Young Girl Reading the Qur'an, then, have been misleading, and our own preconceived perceptions must now change. Rather than an image of pious devotion, the artist engages slyly in a game.
The meaningful disjunction that Eldem observes in Young Woman Reading, signalled by the book, is discovered elsewhere in the composition as well. Its architectural details, accessories, and exotic fabrics and objets recur regularly in his works, suggesting that the relationship between documentation and imagination is more complex than it appears. (It is important to note in this context that Osman Hamdi's paintings were rarely if ever exhibited in his native Turkey, where such inconsistencies might have been more readily observed. Indeed, in addition to overlooking the architectural pastiches that characterize even the most compelling of his works, contemporary audiences in England and Europe seem not to have noticed the regular appearance of the artist and his family members in several painted scenes). The striking geometric pattern of the open window's metal grates, for example, is similar to those on the right-hand side of Women Strolling (1887, Yapi Kredi Bankasi Collection) and Women at the Entrance to the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed (Erol Kerim Aksoy Collection), as well as to that in Two Musician Girls, while the almost hypnotic expanse of hexagonal blue-and-white tiles, inspired by examples in local museum collections and by those observed in situ at the Topkapi Palace and the Green Mosque (Yeşil Cami) in Bursa, reappear in Four Slaves (1880, Erol Kerim Aksoy Collection), to similar dazzling effect. The woman's bright yellow dress too is a familiar presence in Osman Hamdi's works from this period, being featured in Gathering Lilacs (1881, Private Collection) and Young Woman Standing (1884, private collection). Its repetition creates an additional link between the subjects of his pictures, and alludes to an intriguing narrative thread.
The care with which clothing is rendered in Osman Hamdi's art is significant for reasons that extend beyond the pictures as well. Women's fashion in Constantinople had, since the 1850s, been in a state of evolution and change. French fashion magazines were widely circulated – even within the harem - and dresses were ordered directly from Paris or commissioned from seamstresses in Pera, in emulation of the styles. As elements of European fashion were selectively adopted and combined with traditional Turkish dress, a hybrid style emerged – one that did not conform to the exotic imaginings of European artists and travellers, and so was often omitted from their works. Osman Hamdi's numerous images of Turkish women sporting the actualities of indoor and outdoor dress, and the young woman reading here, are all the more important, then, for their honest observations of the changes that were taking place. (This is particularly apparent in Osman Hamdi's works from the 1880s and '90s, in which Turkish women's traditional tailored feraces, or outdoor cloaks, dot his canvases with newly introduced colours and zest.) Through such chronicling of sartorial realities, Osman Hamdi's pictures may be seen as both the project of a salvage ethnographer, keen to memorialize what vestiges might be left, and that of a journalist, on the frontlines of fashion and style.
Ironically, given Osman Hamdi's concern for topicality, as evidenced by clothing and by dress, the environments within his pictures are often timeless, motionless, and still. Based on various examples of Mamluk and early Ottoman architecture and pieced together from his extensive collections of photographs and prints, these collage-like vacuums conjure the mood of a museum, in which the viewer is a privileged and well-behaved guest. This impression is reinforced by the displays of local handicrafts and goods that exist inside their walls. Though also drawn from the artist's collections, or those he oversaw, the message surrounding them is clear: they are not for the acquisitive department store shopper, but for the "look-but-don't-touch," museum-going connoisseur.
Calm, cool, and collected, the emotionless remoteness of the figure in Young Woman Reading sends a similar message of restraint and reprimand. Her eyes are averted, her posture is stiff, and despite her lips being parted, they do not entice or tempt. Though her origins may lie in the harem pictures of Gérôme and Boulanger, and in contemporary images of female readers in Britain and in France, Osman Hamdi has transformed this woman into something very new. She is the anti-odalisque, the innocent child now matured, and the progressive Turkish liseuse. The artist's interest in this subject is gauged by her recurrence in his art, in various permutations through the years. The culmination of these images may be a painting of 1893, lost to a fire and rarely reproduced today. Here, a young Turkish woman lays on her stomach, stretched out along a low platform or divan. She is absorbed completely by her book, which seems, given her nonchalant comportment, to be a work of literature rather than the Qur'an. The Islamic features of the room in which she basks, as well the clothes she wears, recall the Young Woman Reading, and evoke a similarly modern harem theme. Rather than rejecting the conventional posture of an odalisque, however, or being nearly lost against a patterned wall, the woman in this picture embraces this role with all her lithesome being. Osman Hamdi's game of translation and manipulation, begun with propriety some thirteen years before, concludes emphatically with this reader, and her active, working mind.
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