Osman Hamdi Bey - Early Life

Early Life

Osman Hamdi was the son of İbrahim Edhem Pasha a former Grand Vizier who was a Greek boy from the island of Chios orphaned at a very young age following the 1821 Greek uprising there. He was adopted by Kaptan-I Derya Husrev Pasha and eventually rising to the ranks of the ruling class of the Ottoman Empire.

Osman Hamdi went to primary school in the popular Constantinople quarter of Beşiktaş, after which he studied Law, first in Istanbul (1856), and then in Paris (1860). However, he decided to pursue his interest in painting instead, left the law program, and trained under French orientalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger. During his nine-year stay in Paris, the international capital of fine arts in that period, he showed a keen interest for the artistic events of his day. He also met many of the Young Turks and though exposed to their liberal ideas, as the son of a loyal Ottoman Paşa, did not participate in their activities.

Osman Hamdi also met his first wife Maria, a French woman, in Paris when he was a student. After receiving his father's blessings, she accompanied him to Constantinople when he returned in 1869, where the two got married and had two daughters.

His stay in Paris was also marked with the first visit ever by an Ottoman sultan to Europe where Abdülaziz was invited to the Exposition Universelle (1867) by Emperor Napoleon III.

Once back in Turkey, he was sent to the Ottoman province of Baghdad, as part of the administrative team of Midhat Pasa, who would later become an important reformer of the Tanzimat. In 1871, he returned to Constantinople, as the vice-director of the Protocol Office of the Palace. During the 1870s, he worked on several assignments in the upper echelons of the Ottoman bureaucracy.