In ‘The Mosque’, Osman Hamdi Bey presents a street scene characteristic of the East. A narrow alleyway flanked by upper-storey bay windows, jutting frames, stone façades and shuttered shops, gains depth and unfolds through warm gradations of light and shade. At the centre of the composition rises a mosque with its minaret; while merchants, vendors and customers animate the foreground. The mosque’s architecture differs markedly from classical Ottoman models. Instead of the tall, slender cylindrical minarets typical of the imperial style, here we see a broader, shorter structure with a wide balcony. Its dome, partially embedded in an asymmetrical roof, along with the irregular layout and whitewashed surface, evokes the architectural vernacular of Mesopotamian cities such as Baghdad, where Osman Hamdi lived between 1869 and 1871. The building recalls the modest provincial mosques constructed with local materials.
Seated at the foot of the mosque wall is a woman in a yellow entari, her wares arranged in a bowl before her. The silver bangles on her left wrist catch the light, highlighed in white brushstrokes. To the right, in the shadowed recesses of the scene, an elderly man and a woman sit quietly, while a shopkeeper can be glimpsed behind partially opened shutters. A sherbet vendor stands at the meeting point of light and dark, depicted in profile, with a large basket strapped to his back. The scene thus conveys the rhythms of daily commercial life. Osman Hamdi renders architectural elements with careful fidelity: wooden shutters, cantilevered balconies, and windows appear with precise draughtsmanship, echoing the defining features of Eastern urban architecture. Comparable attention to monumental mosque structures and architectural details recurs throughout the artist’s works from this period.
Between 1860 and 1869, Osman Hamdi trained in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, studying in the ateliers of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger – two of the foremost painters of the Orientalist genre. It was here that he first encountered the visual language and conventions of Orientalism. Yet unlike his European contemporaries, Osman Hamdi responded to these traditions not as an outsider looking in, but as an Ottoman citizen – one intimately familiar with the cultures being represented. Returning to Istanbul in 1868, he was appointed the following year as Director of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Province [Vilayet Umur-u Ecnebiye], accompanying Midhat Paşa on an official posting to Baghdad. During his two-year stay, he closely studied the city’s built environment, street life, and social fabric. Although he produced relatively few landscapes, most dating from the 1870s, ‘The Mosque’ is believed to stem from the impressions he formed during this time.
‘The Mosque’ exemplifies Osman Hamdi Bey’s synthesis of academic painting techniques with lived observation of the geographies he inhabited. His experiences in Baghdad enabled him to offer an internal, grounded perspective on the architecture and daily life of the East. This observational approach stands in sharp contrast to the dominant tropes of Western Orientalism, which often cast the East as exotic, regressive, violent, sensual, or static – trapped outside the flow of history. In this painting, figures are not idealised or dramatised; they appear in the quiet simplicity of daily life. The mosque, reminiscent of North African or Mesopotamian forms, is not used ornamentally but emerges as the structural and symbolic anchor of the composition. The treatment of light and shadow, the spatial relationships between figures, and the careful calibration of perspective all recall Osman Hamdi’s engagement with photography. In these respects, ‘The Mosque’ reflects the artist’s distinctive position as what some have called a ‘native Orientalist’, an Ottoman painter who appropriated the visual strategies of Orientalism while turning them inward, offering not a theatricised spectacle but an intimate, inhabited space.
