In Istanbul, I Caught Sight of the “Dream” of Late Ottoman Painting
If you travel to Istanbul, what first rises in most people’s minds is probably the domes of its mosques, the wind off the Bosphorus, the legends of Topkapı Palace, or the particular kind of “imperial last splendor” embodied by Dolmabahçe Palace.
But this time, what truly made me stop was neither a dome nor a chandelier. It was a group of paintings.
I walked into the National Palaces Painting Museum, which operates under the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye. What it holds is a remarkably telling fragment of the visual history of the late Ottoman Empire. The museum is located within the Dolmabahçe Palace complex, in the former Crown Prince’s residence. Its collection centers on Ottoman court holdings from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth and includes Ottoman and Turkish painters such as Osman Hamdi Bey, Şeker Ahmed Pasha, and Hoca Ali Rıza, as well as European painters like Aivazovsky and Zonaro. Among the highlights are Aivazovsky’s seascape series and Zonaro’s historical and court-themed works.
Put simply, the museum is exceptionally well suited to answering one question: when the Ottoman Empire entered its final phase, how did it learn to paint itself in the language of “Western oil painting” without becoming entirely Western?
If I had to sum up the character of the collection in a single sentence, it would be this: it shows the late Ottoman transition from traditional courtly visual culture to modern European-style painting.
Here, you will often encounter several very typical kinds of works.
The first is portraiture associated with the court and the upper classes. These paintings have clearly adopted a European oil-painting vocabulary: the figures have volume, they inhabit space, their clothing has tactile presence, and their poses are carefully calibrated to convey status and identity. They are no longer the figures of traditional miniature painting, confined to the page; they are much closer to the modern idea of portraiture—where the person in the image is not merely recorded but presented.
The second category is landscape and urban scenery: street scenes of Istanbul, views of the strait, courtyards, harbors, trees, and sky. These paintings matter enormously, because they show us that late Ottoman painting was no longer concerned only with courtly narrative; it had also begun to gaze at urban life itself. The empire was not merely a political concept. It was also a space to be seen, strolled through, and remembered.
Then there is a third category: still lifes and interior arrangements. Fruit bowls, vases, textiles, furniture, tabletop objects—of course these subjects are entirely familiar in European art history. But in the late Ottoman world, they take on a rather special quality: less heavy, less showy, and not especially interested in proclaiming, “Look how convincing these grapes are—you could practically reach out and take one.” Instead, they seem to say, "Please, sit; please, look. This is a way of living and also an order of beauty.”
You also begin to feel that, taken as a whole, these works share a common style. They are indeed already very “Western”—they use oil paint, understand perspective, value realism, know anatomy, and know space. And yet at the same time, they never fully move into that dramatic, weighty, high-contrast modeling of light and dark that we associate with classical European painting.
Standing before these works, I kept returning to the same impression: they are indeed speaking in the grammar of Western oil painting, but their tone of voice is altogether different.
If we are familiar with European painting of the Renaissance and Baroque periods—especially Caravaggio, Rembrandt, the Spanish Golden Age, or the Dutch still-life tradition—we become used to a very forceful visual logic: where the light enters, where the dark presses down, how objects are built into substantial bodies, how a face emerges from shadow, how silver catches the light on a table, and how fruit announces its skin and juice. It is a profoundly “three-dimensional” kind of painting and also a profoundly assertive one.
But many of the late Ottoman works I saw in this museum are not like that.
Their light is often gentler; their contrasts of light and shade are less severe. The darks are gentle, and the highlights are subtle. Figures are not struck out of darkness by fate, as in the Baroque. Still lifes do not sit on tabletops with the dense, emphatic gravity of the Dutch school. Many of these images carry a feeling of lightness, stillness, thinness, and distance.
They feel less like drama than like recollection; less like “reality is here before you” than like “reality has just passed through a dream.”
Even the still lifes are like this. Vessels, fruit bowls, utensils, tablecloths—these are precisely the kinds of subjects on which painters traditionally show off texture and mass. But here they are often quieter, more restrained, and more as though they have been looked at tenderly rather than carved into visibility.
So the question becomes: why?
Because although these works adopted the form of Western oil painting, they did not wholly inherit the classical European tradition of “strong light, strong dark, strong volume, strong drama.” What they developed instead was a highly distinctive hybrid language.
The first thing to understand is that late Ottoman painting came under European influence mainly in the nineteenth century. In other words, the “Western painting” it encountered was not the living immediacy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Renaissance and Baroque art, but rather a version of European painting already filtered through nineteenth-century academic art, salon culture, and modern art education.
That is crucial.
For the nineteenth century, European academic painting was often more restrained than the Baroque, more concerned with polished finish, and more inclined toward neatness, calm, and elegance than toward those grandly theatrical effects in which the heavens split open and destiny descends in a shaft of light.
So if we take these late Ottoman works and set them head-to-head with Caravaggio, we will naturally observe their chiaroscuro to be comparatively weak. But that is hardly the point: they were never trying to go down Caravaggio’s road.
They seem to be saying something more like this: I am keen to learn oil painting, but I do not wish to become a thunderous beam of holy light streaking across the ceiling of a European church.
But that is not the whole story.
Although late Ottoman painters largely learned European perspective, anatomy, and realism, older local visual traditions do not simply leave the stage because a new course has been added to the curriculum.
The Ottoman Empire’s earlier pictorial traditions—miniature painting above all—placed less emphasis on the modeling of light and dark than on line, color fields, order, ornament, and narration. Its world was often flatter. Objects did not necessarily have to swell into form through shadow, nor did space have to resemble a three-dimensional stage one might walk into.
So even by the nineteenth century, when painters were already working in oil on canvas, their way of seeing often still preserved traces of those older traditions: they observed objects, but they also arranged them; they pursued truth, but did not insist on pressing truth into dense bodily mass; they accepted Western technique, but still favored a pictorial order that was clear, balanced, and restrained.
What we see, then, is not fully Europeanized light but a softer, calmer sense of volume. And it is precisely in that softness that the pictures often acquire a slightly dreamlike air: not by departing from reality, but by making reality just a shade lighter.
Put playfully: they learned this foreign language called Western oil painting, but when they spoke it, their native accent remained.
And if we go one step further, this also has to do with subject matter itself.
In classical European painting, strong chiaroscuro often serves religious feelings, historical narratives, and dramatic climaxes. That light does not merely illuminate figures; it manufactures spiritual weight.
But many of the subjects of late Ottoman painting are not religious dramas. They are portraits, landscapes, still lifes, courtyards, straits, interiors, and cityscapes.
These paintings are not chiefly trying to astonish you, instruct you, or save your soul. They are more interested in creating a mode of looking that is civilized, elegant, and modern.
You might understand it as the aesthetic bearing of a late empire: the world is changing, order is already loosening, and yet the image must still keep its composure. Even a vase must stand with decorum; even the light over the Bosphorus must not make too much of a scene.
So this relatively subdued treatment of light and shade may not be a sign of “insufficient skill” at all. It may, on the contrary, be an aesthetic choice.
And that brings me to what I consider most enchanting about these works.
A great deal of classical European painting makes you feel the weight of things very strongly: metal is heavy, apples are solid, tablecloths are thick, and the human body takes up space.
In many late Ottoman works, by contrast, the darks are not pressed too hard, the contours are not cut too sharply, the tonal passages are allowed room to turn and breathe, and the edges often retain a certain looseness. This treatment softens drama but heightens atmosphere. As a result, things in the painting no longer land in reality with a thud; they hover ever so slightly above it.
That is why they can feel dreamlike. Not like the strange dreams of Surrealism, but like a small afternoon dream in an age of civilization: awake, but not entirely awake; real, yet lightly veiled by the filter of memory.
Standing in this painting museum today, it is easy to fall back, almost unconsciously, on the standards of European art history: why is there no such weighty light here? Why are the still lifes not more “hardcore”? Why do the figures seem less sculptural?
But the truth is that these paintings are neither traditional miniatures nor pure Baroque; they belong neither wholly to the old Ottoman world nor wholly to the new European one. They stand somewhere in between, in transition, in that moment when the late wind of empire is still moving through the air.
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