ISTANBUL.- Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum revives Osman Hamdi Bey's The Tortoise Trainer, one of the best-known works of Turkish painting, with a virtual reality project. The project, which was launched on the 15th anniversary of the inclusion of the painting in the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation’s Orientalist Painting Collection, is titled "A Journey into the World of Osman Hamdi Bey: Virtual Reality Experience”. Developed with data and documents accumulated from various archives and collections, the VR application allows the visitors to tour Osman Hamdi Bey’s workshop and interact with many important elements ranging from the artist's personal belongings to the music of the period.

Pera Museum re-introduces Osman Hamdi Bey’s signature work The Tortoise Trainer to art enthusiasts on a different platform this time. The project titled “A Journey into the World of Osman Hamdi Bey: Virtual Reality Experience” by Muse VR enables the audience to travel back in time to early 1906 and experience this famous art inside Osman Hamdi Bey's working space. This experience, enriched with works from the “Orientalist Painting”, “Anatolian Weights and Measures” and “Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics” collections of Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, reflects the characteristics of the period with great attention to detail and invites aesthetes into Osman Hamdi Bey's studio. The audience has the opportunity to explore many details from the artist's books sitting on his desk to his paintings, his glasses and brushes to photographs, and can also step inside The Tortoise Trainer painting.

“We are transcending the physical limitations of the museum space to offer more experiences"
Noting that the social landscape was being transformed with the fast-paced advancement in technology and that this transformation entailed a change in the museum concept, Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Culture and Arts Enterprises General Manager Özalp Birol stated that they designed a new experience for art lovers by expanding the museum experience beyond the physical limitations of the museum space. Özalp Birol describes the project as follows: “With virtual reality, we are making the museum experience more personal and interactive, thus more immersive for our visitors. This project gives valuable insights into one of the most precious works of Turkish painting: Osman Hamdi Bey's “The Tortoise Trainer”, which we added to our collection 15 years ago.”

Visitors can find this experience in the special section devoted to Osman Hamdi Bey at the Sevgi and Erdoğan Gönül Gallery.

Pera Museum visitors can enjoy “A Journey into the World of Osman Hamdi Bey: Virtual Reality Experience” free of charge. The VR experience is open to visitors on weekdays between 11.00 - 14.00 and 16.00 - 19.00, on Fridays 11.00 - 14.00 and 17.00 - 21.00, and at weekends from 12.00 - 17.00.

Pera Museum can be visited from Tuesday to Saturday between 10:00 and 19:00 and on Sundays from 12:00 to 18:00. Fridays at the museum are long and free! On "Long Fridays”, the museum can be visited free of charge from 18:00 until 22:00. On “Young Wednesdays”, all students can visit the museum free of charge.

The Art of Osman Hamdi Bey
For Osman Hamdi Bey, who was primarily defined as a man of culture and arts, painting was a lifelong passion that he wanted to devote more time into to further develop his skills. Following his art education in Paris, Osman Hamdi Bey submitted his paintings to major exhibitions held in the country capitals across Europe. His works were influenced by the aesthetic approach and tendencies dominating the art circles of Paris, mainly orientalism. The artist brought a new breath to Turkish painting with his monumental figure works. The scenes he created with figures are remarkable in terms of their stylistic similarities with the works of leading western orientalist painters such as Jean-Leon Gérôme, Rudolf Ernst and Ludwig Deutsch. On the other hand, Osman Hamdi Bey's approach to orientalism, which observes the East from within, differs from western painters. His paintings do not depict violence and eroticism, which sometimes serve as powerful elements of expression in orientalist works. The figures dressed in Ottoman clothes are shown in an eastern setting surrounded by eastern objects. For his orientalist works where he paid meticulous attention to detail, the artist often used photographs, objects from his own collection or the Imperial Museum’s (Müze-i Hümayun) collections, and clothes found in the photographic album Elbise-i Osmaniye, which he personally took part in preparing for the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair. For the male figures in his paintings, he often used his own photographs in which he posed in different clothes, and sometimes asked his family and close relatives such as his son or nephew to be his models. In addition to the orientalist scenes, portraits of his family members and relatives and especially landscapes from Gebze and Eskihisar also occupy a large place in his works. In these paintings by Osman Hamdi Bey, we see that, instead of the academic style in which all the details are elaborated, a more freestanding brush technique reminiscent of impressionism was used.

The Tortoise Trainer
The Tortoise Trainer is a painting by Osman Hamdi Bey, which was on display at the Salon exhibition organized by Société des Artistes Français on May1, 1906 with the French title “L’homme aux Tortues” (the Man with Tortoises) and named simply as “Tortoises” in English in one of the exhibition catalogues. The date “1906” on the painting suggests that it must have been completed in the first months of the year in order to have it ready for the exhibition in May.

In a letter to his father which he wrote when he was in Baghdad, 37 years before completing his painting, Osman Hamdi Bey expressed his gratitude for receiving an issue of Le Tour du Monde and stated that he enjoyed reading it. That issue of the magazine included an article by Swiss diplomat Aimé Humbert, describing what the author had seen in Japan, mentioning tortoise trainers who were usually Korean. Represented by an engraving describing this activity, the article explained that the trainers would teach the tortoises to walk in a row and to climb on top of each other on a low table while accompanied by a rhythm played on a small drum. It can be thought that this article and engraving inspired Osman Hamdi Bey for his celebrated work The Tortoise Trainer.

In the scene depicted by Osman Hamdi Bey, a man in Eastern attire is examining in a contemplative fashion, the tortoises roaming and feeding on the greens on the floor. He holds a lute in his hand, and a percussion instrument like a nakkare or kudum hangs down from his back. The pediment of the lancet window in front of which he stands bears the following inscription “Şifa’al-kulûp lika’al Mahbub”, meaning "Closeness to the Beloved (Muhammad), healing to the heart”. The scene takes place in one of the upper-story chambers of Bursa’s Yeşil Camii (Green Mosque) and, as in many other paintings by the artist, the male figure is Osman Hamdi himself. Although the instruments on his back and in his hand suggest that he might be a dervish, his skull cap is similar to the “Kurd of Mardin”-style skull cap, which is described as “felt calpac wrapped in Yemeni scarfs” in the Elbise-i Osmaniye. Osman Hamdi is known to have taken some photographs posing with these clothes during his time in Vienna. The artist most likely used various photographs for the details of the figure and setting, a method he frequently used for his other paintings.

A year later, Osman Hamdi Bey made a smaller painting that had the same composition with some differences in details. On this second version, there is a writing stating that Osman Hamdi Bey dedicated it to his child’s father-in-law Salih Münir Pasha. Osman Hamdi Bey passed away on February 24, 1910 in his waterfront mansion in Kuruçeşme at the age of 58, a few years after completing his work known as “The Tortoise Trainer”.