The turtle educator
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| The turtle educator |
|---|
| Osman Hamdi Bey , 1906 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 221.5 × 120 cm |
| Pera Museum |
The picture The Turtle Trainer ( Turkish Kaplumbağa Terbiyecisi ) by the Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey from 1906 is a famous painting in Turkey . The painting is now in the Pera Museum in Istanbul .
image
In a room decorated with elaborate wall paintings, five turtles crawl on a tiled floor on which lettuce leaves are scattered as food. Three turtles have lined up in front of a dervish , two crawl over to it. The dervish holds a six-hole nay flute behind his back. He wears a strap over his left shoulder, with which a drum and a drumstick are connected. Daylight comes into the room through a floor window in the bay window. The plaster in the room and on the bay wall is crumbling. The location may be on the upper floor of the Green Mosque in Bursa . The person may be Hamdi Bey himself. The picture is signed.
Osman Hamdi Bey had from 1860 during his law studies in Paris a . a. at Louis Boulanger and the history painter Jean-Léon Gérôme learned the painting was in 1869 after Istanbul returned and made a career in the civil service of the Ottoman Empire . He became the founder and director of today's Archaeological Museum , but continued to paint alongside. Hamdi Bey may have been inspired by a print based on a Japanese engraving that appeared in the French magazine Le tour du monde in 1869 for The Tortoise Educator . This illustration Charmeur de tortues by L. Crépon shows a man who "conjures up" turtles with his drum music.
Hamdi Bey submitted his picture, which in its painting style is considered an homage to French salon painting , to the Paris Salon , where it was first exhibited in 1906. There it was titled L'homme aux tortues , a man with turtles . In 1907 Hamdi Bey painted a second, slightly altered version of the motif, which bears a handwritten dedication by the painter to Ahmed Muhtar Pascha .
reception
According to the historian Edhem Eldem , the image is interpreted differently in today's Turkey depending on the viewer's political partisanship: The Turkish traditionalist sees in it the beauty and dignity of the Ottoman Empire . For the new Kemalists, on the other hand, the picture shows that the turtles, i.e. the traditionalists, have to be forced into modernity, for them the picture is an “icon of standstill”.
The picture was bought by TV entrepreneur Erol Aksoy in 1992 for $ 700,000 , the highest price at the time for a painting by a Turkish artist. On December 12, 2004, it was offered at auction and again achieved a price of 3.5 million US dollars. The painting was bought by the Suna and Inan Kıraç Foundation for their privately operated Pera Museum in a bidding war with Istanbul Modern . In 2009, the second picture from private ownership was shown in an exhibition of Turkish painting from 1860 to 1930.
The media excitement that went along with this painting auction and the price achieved spread to the public, so that the image motif could subsequently be reproduced and sold a million times and also applied to everyday objects.
literature
- Edhem Eldem : Making Sense of Osman Hamdi Bey and his Paintings , in: Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World , Volume 29, 2012; ISSN 0732-2992
- Mustafa Cezar: Sanatta batı'ya açılış ve Osman Hamdi , Volume 2; Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Eğitim, kältür, spor ve sağlık vakfı, 1995; P. 732
- Wendy MK Shaw: Possessors and possessed: museums, archeology, and the visualization of history in the late Ottoman Empire . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g Julia Voss : An uprising without heraldic animal , FAZ , July 6, 2013, p. 31. There are also the comments made by Edhem Eldem in an interview.
- ↑ a b c d Wendy MK Shaw: Ottoman painting: reflections of western art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic . London, IB Tauris, 2011, pp. 72-73
- ↑ a b c d e f Hasan Kanbolat: The Tortoise Trainer ( Memento of the original dated August 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at Today's Zaman , April 2, 2009
- ↑ No evidence in the Catalog illustré du salon 1906
