Osman Hamdi Bey

Osman Hamdi Bey painted his view of the Nippur excavation in 1903, just after the final season of exploration at the site. The Hilprecht family owned the work until 1930, when it came to the Penn Museum on loan from Elise Robinson Paumgarten, the granddaughter of Hermann Hilprecht's second wife, Sallie Crozer Robinson. In 1948, the Hilprecht family donated the painting and it was accessioned into the Penn Museum’s collection. Since then, it has been kept in the museum’s archives and was conserved in 2000-2001. Until the current exhibition, these brief facts summed up everything that was known about the work. Although documentation of the painting remains scarce, it is now possible to reconstruct the circumstances of the painting’s creation and its subsequent travels from Osman Hamdi’s studio to Hermann Hilprecht’s home in Jena and finally to the Penn Museum.

The painting represents the site of Nippur as it appeared during the third season of excavation, which lasted from 1893 until 1896. To create this work, Osman Hamdi, who had never visited Nippur, relied on a photograph taken by John Henry Haynes, reproducing the photograph’s appearance in almost every detail. The photograph was later included as the frontispiece to Hilprecht’s book, Explorations in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth-Century, published in 1903, and Hilprecht’s account of the excavation, as well as his comments on Haynes’s photograph itself, allow for a more precise identification of the painting’s subject matter. Hilprecht reports that during the Nippur expedition’s third season, workers focused on an area northwest of the ziggurat, known as the “temple mound.” The exploration yielded remarkable finds, including over 20,000 cuneiform tablets, roughly 500 fragments of vases, several sections of the temple court, and the remains of pre-Sargonic structures surrounding it. It is the southeast portion of the temple court that Osman Hamdi chose to portray in the Nippur painting, omitting any representation of the pre-Sargonic ruins visible in the foreground of Haynes’s photograph.

The reception of Osman Hamdi’s paintings in the twentieth century mainly focused on his Orientalist works. One line of illustrious art critics and historians, exemplified by Nurullah Berk in the first half of the century and Sezer Tansuğ in the second half, criticized the artist for his derivative imagery and for subscribing to the idiom of French Orientalism instead of inventing a distinctly Turkish visual language. In response to this criticism, other historians have read a pedagogical mission in Hamdi’s work, one of correcting Western stereotypes about the East.

While a detailed analysis of the scholarship on Hamdi’s Orientalist painting is beyond the scope of the present article and has been done efficiently by other scholars, I would like to draw attention to a particular tendency in this body of writing: that is, to the interchangeable deployment of the terms “Ottoman,” “Turkish,” and “us” that conflates late nineteenth-century identity politics in the Ottoman Empire with late twentieth-century Republican Turkish nationalism. The following paragraph by Mustafa Cezar, author of the only monograph on the artist, is representative of this approach:

In Osman Hamdi[’s work], an Orientalist painter, there is a distinct atmosphere, a distinct rendering of the subject matter that distinguishes him from European Orientalist painters. The magical factor that creates this important difference is no doubt the fact that Osman Hamdi is a member of these lands, of this society. Of course he would approach the subjects representing this country with a different sensitivity than the Westerner, and would reflect his sentiments in his work. (…) Even if most of the costumes he depicted are not Turkish, the actual elements that announce their belonging to us are architectural elements, ornaments and accessories.