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Lot Essay
This important and unusual costume album is attributable to the Ottoman painter Fenerci Mehmed, active during the first half of the 19th century. Its paintings are very close to those belonging to another album (now in the Rahmi Koç collection) that bears a colophon with this artist’s name, the date Muharram AH 1226/January–February 1811 AD, and the toponym Bayezid, the neighbourhood in Istanbul where he was presumably based. Albums containing paintings of variously dressed members of Ottoman society were produced in the hundreds by the commercial artists of Istanbul between the 17th and 19th centuries, catering to the interests of viewers who regarded costume as a window onto the empire’s workings. But whereas the vast majority of surviving examples were made for Western travellers and diplomats, who often had them captioned in their own languages, the paintings of Fenerci Mehmed typically feature captions in Ottoman Turkish, suggesting that their target audience was an Ottoman one.
Nothing secure is known about the artist beyond the information provided by the aforementioned colophon (on which see Midhat Sertoğlu’s introduction to the 1986 facsimile of the Koç album, Ottoman Costume Book: Fenerci Mehmed). That his name identifies him as a Muslim is in itself notable, however, as what little we know of other Ottoman costume-album painters of this period indicates that most belonged to Istanbul’s Greek and Armenian communities. The present album itself gestures towards these communities through its inscriptions, for in addition to the Ottoman labels found under almost all of the images, nearly half of the paintings feature captions in the Armenian and, to a lesser extent, Greek alphabets, the three scripts sometimes occurring all together. These Armenian and Greek texts are not translations but transliterations of Turkish (sometimes differing in details from the Ottoman texts they accompany), while actual Greek captions, written in a smaller hand, appear on the versos of several of the folios. Such linguistic variety perhaps reflects the paintings’ anticipated customer base, which might potentially have included Turcophone Greeks and Armenians as well as Greek-reading individuals who did not understand Turkish. The translations on the versos might also reflect the participation of Greek artists in Fenerci Mehmed’s workshop, as suggested by Nurhan Atasoy in relation to another album of this group (see her essay in the Koç facsimile). At any rate, the inconsistency in the different scripts’ occurrence suggests that the paintings were already captioned before being selected for compilation.
Covering a broad spectrum of Ottoman society, from the grand vizier to a street sweeper and foreign visitors, the paintings composing the album are in many ways consistent with other Ottoman costume imagery of the period. Many of the depicted individuals, the majority of whom belong to the military class, represent recurrent ‘types’ that can be found in dozens of albums produced between the 1780s and 1830s, while the images’ broadly naturalistic style reflects the Western-derived pictorial mode that prevailed in Ottoman courtly and commercial painting from the late eighteenth century onwards. Fenerci Mehmed’s approach is distinguished by its less gradated modelling and its thicker outlines—features that perhaps draw on more traditional Islamic painting techniques—as well as by the placement of the figures on a simple earth ground against a light blue sky, in contrast to most costume paintings that show their figures without any backgrounds.
Within Fenerci Mehmed’s known oeuvre, the present work stands out for its plenitude, its 150 illustrated folios outnumbering those of at least four of the five other albums that, along with a number of loose-leaf paintings, have thus far been attributed to the artist (the Koç example, for instance, has 97). Even so, gaps in the pagination (latterly added in graphite), evidence of removed folios, and the absence of certain expected figures such as the sultan reveal that the album has suffered several losses. Moreover, the order of the figures, who do not follow the generally hierarchical progression found in most costume albums, suggests that the paintings were shuffled out of sequence before being bound in their current arrangement. Certain groupings, however, remain intact, particularly in the case of the eight female figures, all of whom are clustered together (with a brief interruption) towards the end of the album.
Many of the paintings have very close equivalents in the Koç album, including the grand vizier (fol. 163) and the iskemleci başı (chief porter of the sultan’s footstool, fol. 12), while others represent variations on a shared model: the French ambassador, for example, appears in his native cloak in the Koç album but in the present album is shown having received a fur-trimmed robe from the grand vizier, as explained by the caption (fol. 48). Particularly noteworthy are the uninscribed view of a group of horsemen riding towards a distant town in a hilly landscape, a rare departure from the standard costume-album format (fol. 47); the rather comical portrayal of a guitar player in European dress, captioned with what appears to be a Turkish transcription of Italian (fol. 40); and the depiction of a stately yellow-turbaned man seated on a low sofa and identified in the inscription as ‘Yusuf Kashif, kashif (inspector) of the Bey of Egypt’ (fol. 44), illustrated on the previous page. It is difficult to establish which bearer of this name is being putatively portrayed here (at least two Yusuf Kashifs feature in the history of Ottoman Egypt during the first half of the 19th century), but regardless of who he represents, the presence of a named individual is, outside the portraits of sultans, extremely uncommon in the costume-album tradition and prompts us to the consider the circumstances of the album’s creation and use.
The similarity of the paintings to their Koç counterparts assigns them to about the same period—that is, the early 1810s, a dating supported also by such sartorial details as the French ambassador’s tricolour cockade and sash. The association with Egypt arising from Yusuf Kashif’s portrait is reinforced by the unusual inclusion of an Egyptian mamluk soldier (Mısır kölemeni, fol. 23) and the yet more remarkable captioning of one of the female subjects as ‘The Egyptian lady (Mısırlı sittî) Behiye’ (fol. 138), referring it seems to another known individual of the time. Perhaps the album was compiled by or for a member of the Ottoman ruling or administrative class with ties to Egypt, its content accordingly tailored in small but telling ways. Such customisation would have been facilitated by the way such albums were formed—out of already prepared loose-leaf images that could be combined and adapted to suit the owner’s tastes before being bound together (for more on these practices, see the scholarship of Gwendolyn Collaço).
If this album was indeed intended for an Ottoman viewership, it would originally have opened and ‘read’ from right to left. Its current arrangement, however, is that of a book designed for a Western audience, probably reflecting alterations made to the album between its initial compilation and its acquisition by its first known owners, Alexander and Virginia Weddell. The Weddells met in Calcutta in 1923; Alexander was serving there as Consul-General and Virginia, recently widowed and of adventurous spirit, had embarked on a round-the-world tour. They married later that year. Alexander’s far-flung postings with the diplomatic corps provided him and Virginia with the opportunity to travel much of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and Spain and to come into close proximity to the important collectors, dealers and works of art of these regions. They shared a mutual love of art and collecting, and together they amassed a significant collection of works of art from across the globe. Their home, Virginia House, was a twelfth-century priory which they bought back to the United States from Warwickshire, stone by stone, in 1925.
After the Weddells’ tragic death on New Year’s Day 1948, ownership and management of their collection, including this album, was passed to the Virginia Historical Society, which served as the faithful steward of Virginia House. Virginia House remains open to the public as a historic house museum. In 2017 the Historical Society decided to deaccession pieces that were unrelated to their primary mission of ‘connecting people to America’s past through the unparalleled story of Virginia’ to allow for the better maintenance of the core works at Virginia House, as well as the objects related to the Weddells themselves.
Nothing secure is known about the artist beyond the information provided by the aforementioned colophon (on which see Midhat Sertoğlu’s introduction to the 1986 facsimile of the Koç album, Ottoman Costume Book: Fenerci Mehmed). That his name identifies him as a Muslim is in itself notable, however, as what little we know of other Ottoman costume-album painters of this period indicates that most belonged to Istanbul’s Greek and Armenian communities. The present album itself gestures towards these communities through its inscriptions, for in addition to the Ottoman labels found under almost all of the images, nearly half of the paintings feature captions in the Armenian and, to a lesser extent, Greek alphabets, the three scripts sometimes occurring all together. These Armenian and Greek texts are not translations but transliterations of Turkish (sometimes differing in details from the Ottoman texts they accompany), while actual Greek captions, written in a smaller hand, appear on the versos of several of the folios. Such linguistic variety perhaps reflects the paintings’ anticipated customer base, which might potentially have included Turcophone Greeks and Armenians as well as Greek-reading individuals who did not understand Turkish. The translations on the versos might also reflect the participation of Greek artists in Fenerci Mehmed’s workshop, as suggested by Nurhan Atasoy in relation to another album of this group (see her essay in the Koç facsimile). At any rate, the inconsistency in the different scripts’ occurrence suggests that the paintings were already captioned before being selected for compilation.
Covering a broad spectrum of Ottoman society, from the grand vizier to a street sweeper and foreign visitors, the paintings composing the album are in many ways consistent with other Ottoman costume imagery of the period. Many of the depicted individuals, the majority of whom belong to the military class, represent recurrent ‘types’ that can be found in dozens of albums produced between the 1780s and 1830s, while the images’ broadly naturalistic style reflects the Western-derived pictorial mode that prevailed in Ottoman courtly and commercial painting from the late eighteenth century onwards. Fenerci Mehmed’s approach is distinguished by its less gradated modelling and its thicker outlines—features that perhaps draw on more traditional Islamic painting techniques—as well as by the placement of the figures on a simple earth ground against a light blue sky, in contrast to most costume paintings that show their figures without any backgrounds.
Within Fenerci Mehmed’s known oeuvre, the present work stands out for its plenitude, its 150 illustrated folios outnumbering those of at least four of the five other albums that, along with a number of loose-leaf paintings, have thus far been attributed to the artist (the Koç example, for instance, has 97). Even so, gaps in the pagination (latterly added in graphite), evidence of removed folios, and the absence of certain expected figures such as the sultan reveal that the album has suffered several losses. Moreover, the order of the figures, who do not follow the generally hierarchical progression found in most costume albums, suggests that the paintings were shuffled out of sequence before being bound in their current arrangement. Certain groupings, however, remain intact, particularly in the case of the eight female figures, all of whom are clustered together (with a brief interruption) towards the end of the album.
Many of the paintings have very close equivalents in the Koç album, including the grand vizier (fol. 163) and the iskemleci başı (chief porter of the sultan’s footstool, fol. 12), while others represent variations on a shared model: the French ambassador, for example, appears in his native cloak in the Koç album but in the present album is shown having received a fur-trimmed robe from the grand vizier, as explained by the caption (fol. 48). Particularly noteworthy are the uninscribed view of a group of horsemen riding towards a distant town in a hilly landscape, a rare departure from the standard costume-album format (fol. 47); the rather comical portrayal of a guitar player in European dress, captioned with what appears to be a Turkish transcription of Italian (fol. 40); and the depiction of a stately yellow-turbaned man seated on a low sofa and identified in the inscription as ‘Yusuf Kashif, kashif (inspector) of the Bey of Egypt’ (fol. 44), illustrated on the previous page. It is difficult to establish which bearer of this name is being putatively portrayed here (at least two Yusuf Kashifs feature in the history of Ottoman Egypt during the first half of the 19th century), but regardless of who he represents, the presence of a named individual is, outside the portraits of sultans, extremely uncommon in the costume-album tradition and prompts us to the consider the circumstances of the album’s creation and use.
The similarity of the paintings to their Koç counterparts assigns them to about the same period—that is, the early 1810s, a dating supported also by such sartorial details as the French ambassador’s tricolour cockade and sash. The association with Egypt arising from Yusuf Kashif’s portrait is reinforced by the unusual inclusion of an Egyptian mamluk soldier (Mısır kölemeni, fol. 23) and the yet more remarkable captioning of one of the female subjects as ‘The Egyptian lady (Mısırlı sittî) Behiye’ (fol. 138), referring it seems to another known individual of the time. Perhaps the album was compiled by or for a member of the Ottoman ruling or administrative class with ties to Egypt, its content accordingly tailored in small but telling ways. Such customisation would have been facilitated by the way such albums were formed—out of already prepared loose-leaf images that could be combined and adapted to suit the owner’s tastes before being bound together (for more on these practices, see the scholarship of Gwendolyn Collaço).
If this album was indeed intended for an Ottoman viewership, it would originally have opened and ‘read’ from right to left. Its current arrangement, however, is that of a book designed for a Western audience, probably reflecting alterations made to the album between its initial compilation and its acquisition by its first known owners, Alexander and Virginia Weddell. The Weddells met in Calcutta in 1923; Alexander was serving there as Consul-General and Virginia, recently widowed and of adventurous spirit, had embarked on a round-the-world tour. They married later that year. Alexander’s far-flung postings with the diplomatic corps provided him and Virginia with the opportunity to travel much of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and Spain and to come into close proximity to the important collectors, dealers and works of art of these regions. They shared a mutual love of art and collecting, and together they amassed a significant collection of works of art from across the globe. Their home, Virginia House, was a twelfth-century priory which they bought back to the United States from Warwickshire, stone by stone, in 1925.
After the Weddells’ tragic death on New Year’s Day 1948, ownership and management of their collection, including this album, was passed to the Virginia Historical Society, which served as the faithful steward of Virginia House. Virginia House remains open to the public as a historic house museum. In 2017 the Historical Society decided to deaccession pieces that were unrelated to their primary mission of ‘connecting people to America’s past through the unparalleled story of Virginia’ to allow for the better maintenance of the core works at Virginia House, as well as the objects related to the Weddells themselves.