The Tortoise Trainer

The Tortoise Trainer was completed in 1906 and exhibited that year at the Paris Salon in the Grand Palais under the French title L'homme aux Tortues. Osman Hamdi Bey painted a second, smaller version of the composition in 1907, dedicating it to Salih Münir Pasha; this version was later acquired by the journalist Erol Simavi and exhibited at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in 2009. The first version was formerly in the collection of Turkish businessman Erol Aksoy and was sold at auction in 2004 for US$3.5 million to the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, which placed it on permanent display at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. The painting is widely interpreted as a satirical commentary on the slow pace of reform in the late Ottoman Empire — its completion preceded the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 by only two years. The scene is set at the Green Mosque in Bursa, and scholarship has proposed that the central figure may be a self-portrait of the artist. Osman Hamdi Bey was born in Istanbul in 1842, the son of Grand Vizier Ibrahim Edhem Pasha, and trained in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. A painter, archaeologist, and administrator, he founded the Istanbul Archaeology Museums and the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, and championed the Ottoman legislation that prohibited the export of antiquities abroad. He died in Istanbul on 24 February 1910.