Artist

Sami Yetik

Born in Istanbul, Sami Yetik took his first painting lessons from Osman Nuri Paşa while studying at the Kuleli Military Senior High School. He continued his education at the Ottoman Military College in 1896, where he became a student of Hoca Ali Rıza. In 1899, he was appointed as an art teacher at the Military Veterinary High School in Eyüp. He enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in 1900, graduating with a first-class degree in 1906. In 1909, he was among the founding members of the Society of Ottoman Painters. In 1910 he went to Paris with the support of Commander-in-Chief Mahmud Şevket Paşa. He enrolled in the Académie Julian, where he attended Paul-Albert Laurens’s studio. He returned from Paris in 1912 and wrote articles urging for the innovations he had witnessed in fine arts education to be implemented at the Academy of Fine Arts. He joined the First Balkan War with Mehmed Ali Laga, a close friend he had met as a student at the Kuleli Military Senior High School. They were captured together in 1913, taken to Sofia as prisoners of war, and then released the following year. During the First World War, he worked in the Şişli Studio, established in 1917 to produce war paintings. The resulting works were exhibited in Vienna in 1918. He completed the first volume of his book Ressamlarımız (Our Painters) in 1940 but never finished the second volume.