Osman Hamdi Bey

Osman Hamdi Bey wore several hats in the late Ottoman Empire, and one of them was painter. His best-known canvas, 'The Tortoise Trainer', shows an old man in a red robe standing over tortoises on a floor, an image often read as a wry comment on the slow work of reforming an old state.

Sent to Paris to study law, he came back a trained painter and, more consequentially, an archaeologist and administrator. He founded and ran the Imperial Museum in Istanbul, pushed through the first Ottoman law to keep antiquities in the country, and excavated the royal tombs at Sidon that gave the museum its famous Alexander Sarcophagus.

His paintings put dignified Ottoman figures into precisely rendered tiled interiors, working against the lazy exoticism of European Orientalists. Several hang today in the museums he helped build.