A rare portrait of Osman Hamdi Bey’s wife, painted by the pioneering Ottoman artist himself, has gone on sale at an auction with an estimated value of $1.5 million.
Painted in the 1880s, the oil-on-canvas work, measuring 98 by 68 cm, is less known than Hamdi Bey’s most celebrated paintings, largely because it remained in family hands for decades before entering a private collection.
Until it was sold in 1995, the portrait hung in the home of Cenan Sarc (1913-2012), the granddaughter of Osman Hamdi Bey and his wife Naile Hanim. Born in France as Marie Palyart, Naile Hanim was the artist’s second wife.
The Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul already holds another portrait of Naile Hanim, where the artist painted his wife in left profile, similarly against a gold background.
The museum notes that gold was traditionally used to depict holy figures in Islamic, medieval European and early Renaissance art, and that Hamdi Bey, one of the first Turkish artists to paint women on canvas, used it to “stress the divinity of the figure in his wife Naile Hanim’s portrait.”
Six months ago, Osman Hamdi Bey’s “Preparing Coffee” also made headlines when it sold for £1 million ($1.3 million) at Sotheby’s in London.
The 1881 work, long thought lost and previously known only from a black-and-white photograph, had similarly resurfaced after more than a century in European private collections.
Hamdi Bey’s artistic legacy
Osman Hamdi Bey’s most famous work is “The Tortoise Trainer” (Kaplumbaga Terbiyecisi), painted in 1906 and showcased at the Pera Museum in Istanbul.
The painting is considered one of the most iconic and valuable works in Turkish art history and has achieved record-breaking valuations in past exhibitions.
Born into an elite Ottoman family, Osman Hamdi Bey was sent to Paris in the early 1860s to study law but instead found his calling in painting and archaeology.
Upon returning to Istanbul, he held diplomatic positions and led numerous archaeological expeditions. In 1882, he founded Istanbul’s Academy of Fine Arts, becoming its first director and shaping a new generation of Turkish artists.
By adopting Western artistic technique to depict Eastern subjects, he not only responded to the growing 19th-century market for Orientalist art but also used his deep understanding of Muslim culture to create nuanced, respectful portrayals of Ottoman life.
