Collection
Painting and Sculpture
About the Collection
Sakıp Sabancı Museum’s Painting Collection is composed of select examples of early Turkish painting as well as the works of foreign artists who worked in Istanbul during the later years of the Ottoman Empire. The collection, started by Sakıp Sabancı in the 1970s, constitutes a cultural treasure providing significant clues about the initial phases of Turkish painting, thus proving to be a historic continuation of the SSM’s The Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection. The collection is focused primarily on works created between 1850 and 1950, and in addition to works by local artists such as Rafael Manas (1715-1780), Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), Şeker Ahmed Paşa (1841-1907), Süleyman Seyyid (1842-1913), Nazmi Ziya Güran (1881-1937), İbrahim Çallı (1882-1960), Feyhaman Duran (1886-1970) and Fikret Muallâ (1903-1967), also includes the works of foreign artists like Fausto Zonaro (1854-1929) and Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900). The collection bears witness to the processes of the transformation of Turkish image production and the evolution of the concepts of art and artist, while embodying the clues of the modernization process starting from the Ottoman Empire and continuing with the Republic of Turkey.
