SIGNED HAFIZ MEHMET KHULUSI, OTTOMAN TURKEY, FIRST HALF 19TH CENTURY

Two Ottoman calligraphers sign their works Muhammad Khulusi (Mehmed Hulusi) and are not to be mistaken. The artist responsible for this tughra of Mahmud II very probably lived during the Sultan’s reign and would be Muhammad Khulusi who was the calligrapher Mehmed Sevki Efendi’s uncle and teacher. He was the first librarian of the famous Koca Racip Pasa Library in Istanbul and died in 1874 and would have been very young when he executed this tughra (M. Ugur Derman, Letters in Gold. Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakpi Sabanci Collection, Istanbul, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1998, p.124). The ‘second’ Muhammad Khulusi was born in 1869 and is a prominent calligrapher of the second half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. He died in 1940.