Osman Hamdi Bey’s <i>Turkish Street Scene</i> and Late-Nineteenth-Century Power Relations between the Ottoman and German Empires

Abstract This article examines Osman Hamdi’s 1888 painting Turkish Street Scene (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin) via correspondence acquired from Ottoman and German archives. It aims to contextualize both the painting’s purchase by the Berlin Nationalgalerie and its iconography within German policies toward the Middle East at the time. The author argues that, in correlation with the policies of Sultan Abdülhamid II, Osman Hamdi engaged in power relations with German authorities as the director of Istanbul’s Imperial Museum of Antiquities, creating conditions for the purchase of the painting and the cultivation of his artistic career in the German Empire. The case is made that the painting’s composition manifests a subjectivity in compliance with the prevalent Orientalist discourses reinforcing the hierarchic relations established with the German state.