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Book Description

For more than 30 years, Ömer Koç has quietly been amassing a collection of paintings of the Ottoman Empire worthy of a museum in their own right. The two volumes of Painters of the Ottoman World bring together no fewer than 650 such works, attributed to 160 artists from almost 20 nations. They are an all-engrossing resource for art historians but also for historians of diplomacy, politics, taste, commerce, culture, architecture and fashion.

Volume I, British, Maltese and Levantine Artists in the Ömer Koç Collection, which includes many recent discoveries, is published in fond remembrance of the late Briony Llewellyn, who gave so much to the history of art and, as one of the dwindling number of independent scholars, made so many discoveries among the painters of the Ottoman East. Llewellyn spent many years preparing this book; her absence in the final stages has been much felt.

Volume II, European Artists in the Ömer Koç Collection, goes back as far as the 16th century. However, the majority of the 118 artists introduced by Claude Piening explored the Ottoman world between 1798 – the year that Napoleon assembled 2,000 scientists, painters, architects and writers for his expedition to Egypt – and 1909, when the last autocratic Ottoman ruler, Sultan Abdülhamid, was forced into exile by the Young Turks and his great Italian court painter, Fausto Zonaro, returned to Italy.

The two volumes resemble each other in format, but Briony groups artists broadly by generation and approach, while Claude’s survey is arranged alphabetically, allowing the lottery of chance to throw up a kaleidoscope in which landscapes, seascapes, costume, architecture and glimpses of Ottoman life can talk to each across the centuries.

Geographically, the canvas stretches from Crimea to Morocco. While Egypt and the Classical world provide frequent subject matter, we linger longest on the shores of the Bosphorus. Ultimately, this collection could only have been formed in Constantinople, the Sublime Porte, Istanbul – call it what you will.