Osman Hamdi Bey was an Ottoman administrator, intellectual, art expert, and a
prominent and pioneering painter. He was also an accomplished archaeologist, and is
regarded as the pioneer of the museum curator's profession in Turkey. He was the
founder of Istanbul Archaeology Museums and of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts
(Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi in Turkish), known today as the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts
University. He was also the first mayor of Kadiköy.
Osman Hamdi went to primary school in the popular Istanbul quarter of Besiktas; after
which he studied Law, first in Istanbul (1856) and then in Paris (1860). However, he
decided to pursue his interest in painting instead, left the Law program, and trained
under French orientalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. During his
nine-year stay in Paris, the international capital of fine arts at the time, he showed
a keen interest for the artistic events of his day. Osman Hamdi exhibited three
paintings at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. None seem to have survived today,
An important step in his career was his assignment as the director of the Imperial
Museum (Müze-i Hümayun) in 1881. Throughout his professional career as museum and
academy director, Osman Hamdi continued to paint in the style of his teachers, Gérôme
and Boulanger.
In 1906, Hamdi would go on to pain The Tortoise Trainer. This painting of an
anachronistic historical character attempting to train tortoises is usually interpreted
as a satire on the slow and ineffective attempts at reforming the Ottoman Empire. The
Ottoman Empire, for those who may need a history refresher, was an empire that
controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa between the 14th
and early 20th centuries. It was founded at the end of the 13th century in
northwestern Anatolia by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. After 1354, the Ottomans
crossed into Europe and, with the conquest of the Balkans, the Ottoman empire was
effectively born. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conequest of
Constantinopole in 1453. The advent of World War I - and its aftermath - would
eventually do the Ottoman Empire in.
Cirque du Soleil used the story of the paining as inspiration for the
show's costuming and other thematical elements.
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