Mihrab

Osman Hamdi Bey painted this in 1901, in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, and it was a quietly daring thing for a Muslim official to make. A young woman in a bright yellow gown sits directly on a Qur'an lectern, with heavy religious books scattered on the floor at her feet and a tiled prayer niche, a mihrab, behind her. When it was shown in London in 1903 he gave it the French title La Genese, hinting that the woman is pregnant. Some have read her as Turkey itself, turning its back on old certainties and facing what comes next. Osman Hamdi Bey ran the imperial museum in Istanbul and knew exactly how charged it was to seat a woman where scripture should rest. Who she was is still argued, perhaps his wife, perhaps his daughter Leyla.