Osman Hamdy Bey Turkish, 1842-1910

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
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Fig. 2, Osman Hamdy Bey, Portrait of a Lady, 1881, sold: Sotheby's, London, 14 June 1995, for £524,000
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