Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), artist, administrator, archeologist, and director of the Istanbul Imperial Museum (Müze-i Hümayun), was born to a father (İbrahim Edhem Pasha) who by birth had been Greek Orthodox and had been adopted by Admiral Hüsrev Pasha following the Chios Massacre of 1821. Serving in the highest ranks of the Ottoman elite, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, ambassador to Berlin and Vienna, and briefly as Grand Vizier under Abdülhamid II, İbrahim Edhem remained an important source of financial and professional support throughout Hamdi’s career.

Osman Hamdi Bey was sent to Paris in 1860 to study law, but would focus more on pursuing his interests in painting. He took lessons from the French Orientalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger, whose style was reflected in his own artistic output. Upon his return from France in 1869, Hamdi worked in the Ottoman bureaucracy, initially in Baghdad under the reformist vali (governor) Midhat Pasha; here he became aware of the differences between life in Istanbul and the Arab provinces.

He was appointed director of the Imperial Museum in 1881, succeeding the German Philipp-Anton Dethier, and would hold this position until his death. Under his directorship, the museum greatly expanded its collections, moving in 1891 to a neo-classical building designed by the French-Ottoman architect Alexandre Vallaury. Hamdi also directed the first Ottoman-conducted archeological excavations: Mount Nemrut (1883), Sidon (1887), Lagina (1891). He co-authored accounts of these trips in Le tumulus de Nemroud Dagh (1883) and Une nécropole royale à Sidon: Fouilles de Hamdi Bey (1892).

Hamdi’s policies as director were largely consonant with the priorities of the Hamidian regime in projecting sovereignty over Ottoman territory and asserting the empire’s right to be treated as an equal to European powers. Most significantly, Hamdi helped draw up a legal framework to manage antiquities (Asar-ı Atîka Nizamnamesi) in 1884. Replacing the previous law of 1874, the new regulations forbade the export of archaeological funds from Ottoman territory without the sultan’s permission, and placed all foreign excavations under the supervision of the Ministry of Education. These regulations were further amended in 1906 to extend protection to Islamic as well as Graeco-Roman antiquities.

The new antiquities regulations were enforced to suspend German excavations in Assur, Babylon and Pergamon, and caused consternation among European observers, including Ernest Renan, who complained of the Ottomans’ pretensions to “some imaginary sovereignty”. Notwithstanding his efforts to guard against the encroachment of foreign archeological missions, Hamdi continued to cultivate close personal relationships with scholars such as the French archeologist Salomon Reinach, who helped Hamdi prepare the first formal catalogue of the Imperial Museum’s collections.

Alongside his archeological work, Osman Hamdi Bey is best known today for his painting, which undertook a complex engagement with European Orientalism. While still living in France, he exhibited three paintings at the 1867 Parisian Exposition universelle; henceforth the primary audience for his artworks would remain outside Turkey. Many of his paintings recreated oriental scenes such as harem interiors or mosque fronts, as well as some tropes common to late-19th-century Ottoman art, such as the revival of Kufic calligraphy. Others feature images of a dynamic and modernizing Islamic world, such as his “Girl Reading”. The extent to which paintings such as “The Tortoise Trainer” can be read as containing political messages about Ottoman modernization continues to provoke debate.

In 1882 Hamdi helped to establish the School of Fine Arts (Sanâyi-i Nefîse Mektebi). With the French historian Victor-Marie de Launay, Hamdi also produced Elbise-i Osmaniyye: Les costumes populaires de la Turquie, an illustrated volume cataloguing the traditional costumes belonging to the empire’s various ethnic and religious groups, commissioned by the Ottoman government for its entry to the 1873 World Exposition in Vienna. In his own life, Hamdi adeptly switched between different styles of clothing depending on occasion, and often included himself attired in “national costume” in his own paintinga.

Following his death in 1910, his brother Halil Edhem Eldem took over the directorship of the Imperial Museum, while the Illustrated Ottoman Almanac eulogized Osman Hamdi Bey as both the empire’s “greatest painter” and its “greatest specialist in antiquities”. Subsequent assessments of Hamdi’s legacy have had to negotiate his paradoxical role as the “most Parisian of Ottomans, and the most Ottoman of Parisians”, giving an autonomous institutional framework to Ottoman art and archeology while adopting a Pan-European interest in applied arts, history-writing and the vernacular cultures of imperial peripheries.