Halil Pasha, Seaside Stroll (Sahilde Gezinti), 1889, oil on canvas, 80 x 55 cm
(©Bozluolcay Collection; photo: Hadiye Cangökçe)
The 19th century Ottoman painter Halil Pasha takes centre stage at Pera Museum with an exhibition dedicated to the artist and his work (writes İpek Kozanoğlu).
Born in 1852 in Beylerbeyi, the son of Selim Pasha, one of the founding members of Turkish Military Academy, Halil Pasha was first trained in drawing and painting in the Imperial School of Military Engineering (the forerunner of today’s Istanbul Technical University). He was appointed as an art instructor to the palace and later to the Kuleli Military Senior High School, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus.
Determined to advance his academic training in painting, he travelled to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he trained under the renowned Orientalist painter Jéan-Léon-Gerome. During the eight years he remained in Paris, Halil Pasha exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, receiving a bronze medal for his painting Madame X.
Returning home to Istanbul, he taught oil painting at the Empire’s first fine arts school, the Sanay-i Mefise Mektebi, and later served as the director of Istanbul Archeological Museum between 1917 and 1918. He spent his final years in Egypt where he joined his relative Abbas Halim Pasha. He passed away in 1939 in his home in Beylerbeyi.
Spanning the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Republic, his career marked a decisive shift in Turkish painting. He transformed and enriched Turkish painting tradition by blending it with the Western artistic practices, ushering Turkish art into modernity.
The Pera Museum’s exhibition unfolds chronologically, tracing intimate Parisian portraits and still lives created in ateliers to luminous seascapes in Istanbul and sun-drenched Cairo landscapes painted en plein air, shining a light on the artist’s masterful progression from realism to impressionism. Sketchbooks, personal artefacts, letters and archival press material and works from private collections come together in this exhibition curated by Dr. Özlem İnay Erten in a comprehensive retrospective that captures the steady transformation of a master painter and his oeuvre moulded by his travels, education and the changing social landscape of the Ottoman Empire.
Halil Pasha, Seaside Stroll (Sahilde Gezinti), 1889, oil on canvas, 80 x 55 cm
(©Bozluolcay Collection; photo: Hadiye Cangökçe)
