Halil Paşa

Private collection, Switzerland.

These panels, blending academicism and impressionism, tradition and modernity, exemplify Halil Paşa’s standing as the Turkish artist par excellence to bridge Turkish art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Growing out of the landscape painting that defined early naturalistic art in Turkey in the nineteenth century, they clearly show the influence of the pioneering French Impressionists on Paşa’s work, each a vibrantly painted vignette of modern life in rural Turkey. In Spring, pink helleborus and cherry blossom grace a verdant landscape; in Summer two girls prepare and take tea in the woods; in Autumn, a girl with a bouquet approaches the viewer framed by dahlias in the foreground; and in Winter, a mother watches her boy sledge down a snowy path.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, prior to the foundation of the Istanbul Fine Arts Academy by Osman Hamdy Bey, almost all Turkish artists were soldiers who received tuition in drawing and painting at military school. The Sultans and statesmen were convinced that the key to restoring the power of the Ottoman Empire was by means of training of army officers according to Western methods. The Imperial Land Engineering School was founded in 1793 during the reign of Selim III, and later the Imperial School of Military Sciences was opened in 1834. The schools had drawing in their curriculum, the aim of which was to enable young officers to produce topographic studies and technical drawings. Courses in naturalistic painting (hitherto unknown in Turkey), almost always focusing on landscape painting, followed. At a time when no painting classes existed in civilian schools, young artists, who often went on to become teachers at their military schools, earned themselves the sobriquet ‘soldier painters’.

Halil Paşa is considered among the most famous Turkish painters to graduate from the Imperial Land Engineering School. Ranked a captain, his heart lay in painting, and in 1880 he was finally given his chance when, by order of Sultan Abdülaziz, and following in the footsteps of the slightly older Osman Hamdy Bey, Süleyman Seyyit and Seker Ahmet Paşa, he was sent to the French capital to study in the ateliers of Gérôme and Courtois. Here he received a vigorous training in the tenets of academic figure painting, but in Paris also discovered the art of the Impressionists, which breathed new vigour into his landscapes. Indeed, upon his return to Istanbul in 1888, where he taught at various military schools and later served as Director of the School of Fine Arts, he became a formative influence on the Impressionist movement in Turkey, known as the ‘Generation of 1914’, even becoming known as the ‘Turkish Claude Monet’.