Barbier ambulant 58.

Title

Barbier ambulant 58.

Illustration shows a Turkish barber on his way to the customer. From G. Scotin, after Jean-Babtiste Vanmour.

ca. 1730

Artist

Vanmour (1671-1737)

Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1737) was a Belgian-French painter, best known for his works created in the Ottoman Empire. He was a significant artist of the 18th century, documenting the culture and life of the Ottoman Empire at a time when the contact between Europe and the Ottoman Empire was intense. Vanmour was born in Bruges (Belgium) and later moved to Istanbul (Constantinople), where in 1699, he became the official court painter of the French ambassador François de Callières in the Ottoman Empire. He spent most of his life there, creating numerous paintings, watercolors, and drawings that captured the lives of the Ottomans, including their clothing, architecture, and daily scenes within the empire.

Historical Description

The area of today's Turkey has been populated since the Paleolithic. The name of the Turks comes from Central Asia. The immigrants from whom Turkey got its name were the Oghusen and came from the area around the Aral Sea. The Turkish settlement of Anatolia began with the arrival of the Seljuks in the 11th century AD. Around 1299, Osman I, Gazi (1259–1326) founded the Ottoman dynasty named after him, from which the name of the Ottoman Empire (also called the Turkish Empire) ) derives. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans ruled over large parts of the Middle East, North Africa, the Crimea, the Caucasus and the Balkans. After the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe was brought to a standstill near Vienna and the Ottoman army was defeated there on Kahlenberg in 1683, the empire was pushed back further and further from its European territories to the tip west of the Marmara Sea, between Istanbul and Edirne. The national movements that emerged from the 19th century onwards led to a gradual fragmentation of the empire, the occupation of Turkish North Africa by European powers and finally the defeat in the First World War resulted in its ultimate decline.