Şevket Dağ was born in Istanbul in 1875, and stands among the foremost painters of the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Osman Hamdi Bey and Alexandre Vallaury, graduating at the top of his class in 1897. He went on to teach at several institutions, among them the Galatasaray High School and the Teacher Training School, and in 1909 was one of the founding members of the Ottoman Society of Painters. The first artist in Turkish painting to make the architectural interior a sustained subject of his work, Dağ returned to the Hagia Sophia more than any other building, gaining special permission to set up his easel within it and recording its spaces, its decorative programme, and the behaviour of light across its surfaces with unfailing care.
The painting of architectural interiors had developed as a distinct genre in European art from the seventeenth century onward, and by the nineteenth it had become a central strand of Orientalist painting, with the mosques, palaces and bazaars of the ‘mystical and mysterious’ East among its favoured subjects. The Swiss architect Gaspare Fossati directed the restoration of the Hagia Sophia under Sultan Abdülmecid between 1847–1849; the album of views he prepared during this campaign, published in London in 1852, was among the first substantial visual accounts to present the building as both an aesthetic object and a historical document, and helped establish it as a work of artistic patrimony among Ottoman intellectuals. Şevket Dağ carried this pictorial tradition forward in oil paint, but where Fossati’s purpose had been documentary, the building was for Dağ a living embodiment of Istanbul’s layered identity.
This large canvas from 1908–1909 presents the naos of the Hagia Sophia from a viewpoint anchored by two great porphyry columns in the foreground, whose Corinthian capitals, carved with deeply undercut acanthus foliage, draw immediate attention to the richness of the building’s architectural ornament. The vertical rhythm of the suspended lamps carries the eye towards the arches and upper galleries beyond, while on the right, the book-matched marble revetments attest to the extraordinary variety of surface and material that the interior offers its painters. The gold-ground mosaics covering the walls and vaults fill the space with a weighty, luminous atmosphere, and in the middle distance, on a pendentive, a seraph can be made out by its wings, its face covered since the early seventeenth century. The small figures dotting the floor below serve as a deliberate device of scale, characteristic of Dağ’s interior compositions. The date inscription in the lower right corner (r. 1324, corresponding to 1908–1909) is accompanied by a second inscription recording the artist’s own repair of the canvas in 1943, a detail that speaks to the place this work held throughout his life.
