Old Man in Front of Children's Tombs

In 1903 the Paris Salon, where European Orientalist painters had been showing scenes of the East for decades, hung this canvas by an Ottoman. Osman Hamdi Bey listed it as a dervish in the türbe of the children, a türbe being a domed Ottoman tomb, and he painted its interior as someone who knew the rules of the place. The dervish has left his red slippers at the threshold and stands barefoot, one hand on his chest, the other raised in prayer. Before him lie the cenotaphs under patterned cloths, one topped by a carved turban, with a tall candle and a hanging lamp beside them. The blue tiles and the bands of Arabic calligraphy get the same care as the figure. The Musée d'Orsay now uses that Salon title in place of the plainer Old Man in Front of Children's Tombs.