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Nazlı's photographic games: Said andart history in a contrapuntal modeMary RobertsPublished online: 20 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Mary Roberts (2014) Nazlı's photographic games: Said and art history in acontrapuntal mode, Patterns of Prejudice, 48:5, 460-478, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2014.960659

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Nazlı’s photographic games: Said and art historyin a contrapuntal mode

MARY ROBERTS

ABSTRACT Through a focus on photographic portraits commissioned in the latenineteenth century by the Ottoman-Egyptian Princess Nazlı Hanım, Roberts analysesthe ways they tested Ottoman and western conventions. An examination of Nazlı’sstrategic engagement with photography in this period positions her within the often-separated domains of Egyptian nationalism, Ottoman political reform, westernOrientalist art and a proto-feminist moment of Egyptian women’s history. One ofthe striking things about the Nazlı portraits is their transgressive inventiveness. Thisis transgression as Edward Said defines it, with an emphasis on crossing boundaries,testing and challenging limits, and cutting across expectations. Nazlı’s inventiveness isapparent through her canny experimentation with the codes of portrait photographyand the ways she deploys her portraits as tokens of exchange within her culture andwith her European interlocutors. Roberts argues that Nazlı Hanım’s use of photo-graphy operates in a contrapuntal mode in the Saidean sense of a simultaneity ofvoices that sound against, as well as with, each other. Over the last three decadesSaid’s writings have provided a crucial methodological framework for the critique ofwestern Orientalist visual culture. Recently art historians have repositioned thiscorpus of western imagery in relation to art by practitioners from the region andaddressed cultural exchanges. Said’s seminal text Orientalism has been pivotal withinthese debates. Yet it is not so much this landmark book, but rather Said’s writings onmusic, in which we can find an alternative approach to cross-cultural exchange. Bytransposing this model into the domain of art history, Roberts engages with his notionof reading contrapuntally. Said was interested in the broader applicability of this term,although its potential as an interpretive model for the visual arts remains unexam-ined. Through this case study of Nazlı Hanım’s photographs, Roberts reassesses thevalue of Said’s writings on music for understanding nineteenth-century visual culture.

KEYWORDS: cross-cultural exchange, Edward Said, Edward Said and music, ElisabethJerichau-Baumann, music and nineteenth-century visual culture, Nazlı Hanım, Orientalism,Ottoman painting, photography, reading contrapuntally, transgressive invention

In November 1872 the Ottoman-Egyptian Princess Nazlı Hanım wrote aletter from inside her father’s harem in Istanbul to the daughter of the

painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann. The tone of this letter from one young

My thanks to Tim Barringer, Robert Wellington and Luke Gartlan. The research for thisessay was supported by the Australian Research Council.

Patterns of Prejudice, 2014Vol. 48, No. 5, 460–478, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2014.960659

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woman to another conveys the intimate bonds of friendship and the author’syouthful enthusiasm. Nazlı writes briefly about her imminent marriage andwishes her correspondent happiness in her own forthcoming nuptials.Expressing the desire to travel, Nazlı writes: ‘I have never been out of myown country but still hope that happiness is in store for me one day. I domuch desire to see Rome, Paris and London.’1 This short note, now withJerichau-Baumann’s papers in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, is signedwith the same distinctive signature as the carte de visite of Princess Nazlı(Figure 1) that is still held in the collection of the artist’s family in Denmark.The photographic portrait was a gift from Nazlı to Jerichau-Baumann, whohad painted three portraits of the young Ottoman-Egyptian Princess in 1869.The letter penned three years later is the only remaining fragment of a largercorrespondence between the princess, the artist and her daughter, yet it issufficient to indicate that the European artist’s visit to Istanbul in 1869 hadsparked Princess Nazlı’s imagination, fuelling her desire for travel. Whatplace should this note and the photographic portrait commissioned andauthorized by a young woman who grew up inside an Ottoman harem havewithin our understanding of nineteenth-century Orientalist visual culture?How might these fragments of an encounter challenge our understanding ofthe role of visual culture in exchanges between Ottomans and Orientalists inthis period?

Edward Said’s writings on music provide a lens through which to examinethese issues. Over the last three decades his work has been a crucialprovocation for reinterpreting Orientalist visual culture. Although Said didnot write about art (his disciplinary allegiances were with literary studies), heprovided a model for thinking about how western visual culture participatedin the discursive field of Orientalism.2 Since Linda Nochlin’s groundbreakingessay of 1983 (the first transposition of Said’s Orientalism into the domain ofart history), his ideas have provided an important framework for the analysisand critique of western images of the Orient.3 More recently art historianshave taken up the challenge to reposition this corpus in relation to art bypractitioners from North Africa and the Middle East, and to rethink the formsof cultural encounter and exchange that took place between European andindigenous artists. Studies of Ottoman painting and art patronage as well as areappraisal of the interactions between Ottomans and Orientalists innineteenth-century Istanbul have been central to such reassessments of the

1 Letter from Princess Nazlı Hanım to ‘My dear Mademoiselle’, Stamboul, 26 November1872: Royal Library, Copenhagen, Jerichau-Baumann Papers.

2 In his interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, Said admitted to feeling ‘somewhat tongue-tied’about the visual arts: W. J. T. Mitchell and Edward W. Said, ‘The panic of the visual: aconversation with Edward W. Said’, Boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, 11–33 (11).

3 Linda Nochlin, ‘The imaginary Orient’, Art in America, vol. 71, no. 5, 1983, 118–31,187–91.

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Figure 1 P. Sébah, Princess Nazlı Hanım, carte de visite, n.d. (private collection,Denmark)

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field.4 For both moves within this art historical debate, Said’s seminal textOrientalism has been pivotal. Yet it is not so much in this landmark book, norin his literary studies, but rather in his writings on music that an alternativeapproach to these questions of cross-cultural exchange is to be found.

Throughout his life, Said’s passionate engagement with western classicalmusic, as a pianist and music critic, led to some of his most thoughtfulmeditations on culture and the micropolitics of power. His love of classicalmusic challenged him to address alternative approaches to the western canon.In transposing this thinking into the domain of art history, I want to engage inparticular with his characterization of transgression and his notion of readingcontrapuntally.

In his essay ‘On the Transgressive Elements in Music’, in the context of adiscussion of Foucault’s notion of the mechanisms of power, Said refuses theidea of a totalizing tendency in the effects and implications of the westerncanon of classical music. He asserted: ‘there is always the possibility totransgress’. Said defined transgression as the movement ‘from one domain toanother, the testing and challenging of limits, the mixing and intermingling ofheterogeneities, cutting across expectations, providing unforeseen pleasures,discoveries, [and] experiences’.5 In Said’s essay, the contrapuntal mode, asexemplified in the work of performer Glenn Gould, is one such form oftransgression. In contrast to a musical structure that is defined by a hierarch-ical relationship between a single line melody and its accompaniment,6 thecontrapuntal mode is a polyphonic form in which one musical line operates inconjunction with several others, in which the voices ‘sound against, as well aswith, all the others’, and no one part is subordinated.7 An interest in thecontrapuntal form and reading contrapuntally took on an ethical dimensionbecause ‘music thus becomes an art not primarily or exclusively aboutauthorial power and social authority, but a mode for thinking through orthinking with the integral variety of human cultural practices, generously,

4 See, for example, Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur, Constantinople and theOrientalists, trans. from the Turkish by Joyce Matthews (Istanbul: İşbank 2002), andZeynep Çelik, ‘Speaking back to Orientalist discourse’, in Jill Beaulieu and MaryRoberts (eds), Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham,NC and London: Duke University Press 2002), 19–41.

5 Edward W. Said, ‘On the transgressive elements in music’, in Edward W. Said, MusicalElaborations (New York: Columbia University Press 1991), 35–72 (55). For Said’sreflections on music, see also Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels andParadoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (New York: Vintage Books 2004).

6 Said, Musical Elaborations, 102.7 Edward W. Said, ‘The music itself: Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal vision’, Vanity Fair, vol.

46, no. 3, 1983, 97–101, 127–8 (98). See also Edward W. Said, ‘The virtuoso asintellectual’, in Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain(New York: Pantheon Books 2006), 115–33.

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non-coercively’.8 Exploring notions of ‘reading contrapuntally’ in relation tocanonical literary texts, Said was interested in the broader applicability of theterm.9 However, the implications of this concept for the interpretation of thevisual arts remains unexamined. Said’s notion of the contrapuntal hasinformed my thinking about Princess Nazlı’s dialogic engagement withvisual culture, and has led me to consider her practice as operating contra-puntally in relation to photographic codes of honorific portraiture, westernstereotypes of Oriental femininity and modern Ottoman definitions ofmasculine identity.10 In this essay, through a focus on a series of photographicportraits created by Princess Nazlı, I will analyse the ways she deployed herimage in a range of differing cultural contexts. At times these portraitsconformed to and worked with familiar visual codes; at other times theytested and challenged both Ottoman and western conventions in order toredefine what it was to be a modern elite Ottoman-Egyptian woman.

Visual elaborations

In 1872, at the age of nineteen, Princess Nazlı married Halil Şerif Paşa, thefamous Tanzimat statesman, diplomat and art collector. Their marriage, oneof a number of weddings of the Ottoman elites that took place in Istanbul inthe final months of 1872, shored up the alliance between Nazlı’s father,Mustafa Fazıl Paşa, and Halil Şerif, who had returned from a diplomatic postin Vienna earlier that year. Nazlı’s father was a wealthy and powerful memberof the Egyptian Khedive’s family, and one of the highly westernized Tanzimatelites.11 He was an advocate of constitutional government for the empire, and

8 Said, Musical Elaborations, 105. The term was taken up in poet Mahmoud Darwish’sposthumous elegy to his friend Edward Said; for an analysis, see Rebecca Dyer, ‘Poetryof politics and mourning: Mahmoud Darwish’s genre-transforming tribute to EdwardW. Said’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007,1447–62.

9 See, for example, Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage 1993).10 This essay builds on my earlier work on Princess Nazlı and Elisabeth Jerichau-

Baumann: Mary Roberts, ‘Harem portraiture: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and theEgyptian Princess Nazlı Hanım’, in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (eds), Local/Global: Women’s Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington,VT: Ashgate 2006), 77–98; Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman andOrientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press2007), 128–49; and Mary Roberts, ‘Karşıtlıklar: Said, Sanat Tarihi ve 19. Yüzyılİstanbul’unda Osmanlı Kimliğini Yeniden Keşfetmek’, in Uluslararası OryantalizmSempozyumu (Papers of the International Orientalism Symposium) (Istanbul: İstanbulBüyükşehir Belediyesi 2007), 269–85.

11 For an account of the Khedive’s family and its social and cultural ties to the Ottomanimperial capital Istanbul, see M. Baha Tanman, Nil Kıyısından Boğaziçi’ne: KavalalıMehmed Ali Paşa Hanedanı’nın İstanbul’daki İzleri/ From the Shores of the Nile to theBosphorus: Traces of Kavalalı Mehmed Ali Pasha Dynasty in İstanbul (Istanbul: IstanbulAraştırmaları Enstitüsü Yayınları 2011).

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is remembered for his famous published letter of 1867 to Sultan Abdülaziz,written while he was resident in Paris.12 Nazlı herself had been brought upwith an extensive knowledge of European culture; educated by an Englishgoverness, she was fluent in French, English, Ottoman and Arabic.13 From ayoung age she was a strong, independent young woman, as is evident in herphotograph at age sixteen on horseback dressed in European riding cos-tume.14 The photograph that commemorates her wedding (Figure 2) showsNazlı in a western-style dress with highly ornamented layers of frills and lace.This sartorial choice is indicative of her position at the forefront of a trendtowards European fashion in wedding attire that was emerging in the early1870s among women of the Ottoman palace and the elites.15 Newspaperreports in the Levant Herald of 25 October and 14 December 1872 of her nikâh,the legal ceremony, and the subsequent ceremonies associated with hermarriage, indicate that she had chosen dresses for these various occasions ofrich, light blue silk and heavily embroidered pink velvet, again marking thetrend towards European fashion by moving away from the more traditionalred for an Ottoman bride.16 Nazlı’s wedding followed elaborate traditionalOttoman rituals but differed from those of many of her peers through theinclusion of so many prominent women from Istanbul’s European diplomaticcommunity. The ceremonials were recounted in the local English- and French-language press, including minute descriptions of Nazlı’s dress and the insideof her harem. Nazlı was lauded as ‘a lady whose birth, beauty, education andposition place her … at the head of Turkish female society, and destine her to

12 This document, which advocated constitutionalism, was widely circulated by theYoung Ottomans (a group of intellectuals who were an important voice of politicalopposition) and it had a significant influence on political thinking among theintelligentsia in this period. Mustafa Fazıl Paşa was also a benefactor to the YoungOttomans in exile. On the question of the authorship of the document, see M. ŞükrüHanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ and Oxford:Princeton University Press 2008), 103–4; and, for an account of the document in thecontext of the political ideals of the Young Ottoman intellectuals, see Şerif Mardin,‘Mustafa Fazıl Paşa: mid-nineteenth-century liberalism’, in Şerif Mardin, The Genesis ofYoung Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press 1962), 276–82.

13 On Mustafa Fazıl Paşa, see Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, 276–82.14 Tanman, From the Shores of the Nile to the Bosphorus, 302.15 Leyla (Saz) Hanımefendi, ‘The weddings of Imperial Princesses’, in Leyla (Saz)

Hanımefendi, The Imperial Harem of the Sultans: Daily Life at the Çırağan Palace duringthe 19th Century. Memoirs of Leyla (Saz) Hanımefendi, trans. from the French by LandonThomas (Istanbul: Peva Publications 1995), 169–208; Fanny Davis, ‘Marriage’, in FannyDavis, The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (New York and Westport,CT: Greenwood Press 1986), 61–86; ‘Women’s clothing’, in Woman in Anatolia: 9000Years of the Anatolian Woman, exhibition catalogue, Topkapı Sarayı Museum (Istanbul:Turkish Republic Ministry of Culture 1993), 256–8; Necdet Sakaoğlu, ‘Record of a royalwedding during the Tanzimat period’, National Palaces, no. 4, 1992, 168–73.

16 Levant Herald, 25 October 1872, 174, and ‘The talk of the day’, Levant Herald, 14December 1872, 254.

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Figure 2 Mısırlı Prenses Nazlı (from Mithat Cemal Kuntay, Namık Kemal: DevrininInsanları ve Olayları Arasında, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası 1944), 335)

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fill a prominent part in the social history of her country’.17 This very publicreportage (presumably based on the accounts of the European women inattendance) reputedly raised the ire of the Valide Sultan, Sultan Abdülaziz’smother, who is said to have expressed her displeasure by withholding thecustomary gifts from the Ottoman palace.18 Already at this early stage of herlife, we see Nazlı pushing the boundaries of elite Ottoman social convention.

By the time of her wedding to Halil Şerif, Nazlı had already been a patronof western easel painting through her portrait commissions three years earlier.This was the beginning of a life-long engagement with the visual arts. Despiteher contribution, however, until recently she has been absent from the arthistorical record. While Nazlı’s interest in the arts has been overlooked, herhusband has been given a prominent position. He is renowned for being oneof the most significant art collectors in Paris in the 1860s, and his interest in arthas been extensively demonstrated through the important research of manyscholars, most notably Francis Haskell, Zeynep İnankur and MichèleHaddad.19 By the time of their marriage, Halil Şerif no longer owned hismagnificent art collection, financial difficulties ensuring that he was forced tosell the works four years earlier at auction in January 1868 before leavingParis.20 Villemessant’s observation that Halil Şerif had a fine collection ofFrench painting and sculpture as well as family portraits in his Viennaresidence between 1870 and 1872 suggests that the Ottoman diplomat mayhave endeavoured to rebuild his collection.21 It is possible that these paintingsreturned with him when he journeyed from Vienna to Constantinople in 1872,the year he married Princess Nazlı. Whether or not Halil Şerif remainedactively engaged with the art world in the last seven years of his life isuncertain, but Nazlı most certainly did.

One of the attendees at Nazlı’s wedding was Madame d’Ehrenhoff, the wifeof the Swedish ambassador to Istanbul, who three years earlier had

17 ‘The talk of the day’, Levant Herald, 14 December 1872, 254.18 Roderic H. Davison, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa: the influence of Paris and the West on an

Ottoman diplomat’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları Dergisi/ The Journal of Ottoman Studies, vol. 6,1986, 47–65 (61).

19 Francis Haskell, ‘A Turk and his pictures in nineteenth-century Paris’, in FrancisHaskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays (New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press 1987), 175–85; Zeynep İnankur, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa’, P Dergisi, no. 2,Summer 1996, 71–80; Michèle Haddad, Khalil-Bey: un homme, une collection (Paris: LesÉditions de l’Amateur 2000).

20 In France he was referred to as Khalil Bey (he was promoted in rank from Bey to Paşain 1871). For an account of his involvement in the Parisian art world and notoriety inSecond Empire Paris, see Haskell, ‘ATurk and his pictures in nineteenth-century Paris’.Davison provides a comprehensive account of Halil Şerif Paşa’s political career in histwo articles: Roderic H. Davison, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa, Ottoman diplomat and statesman’,Osmanlı Araştırmaları Dergisi/ Journal of Ottoman Studies, vol. 2, 1981, 203–21; andDavison, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa’.

21 H. de Villemessant, Mémoires d’un journaliste: sixième série, mes voyages et mes prisons(Paris: E. Dentu 1878), 106.

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accompanied the painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann to visit Princess Nazlıin the haremlik of her father’s yalı (seaside mansion) on the shores of theBosphorus in Kandilli.22 It was here that Jerichau-Baumann was to undertakea most unusual portrait commission to paint the young Ottoman-Egyptianprincess. Nazlı was particularly enthusiastic to engage the painter because ofthe associated prestige of commissioning an artist who was a portraitist toEuropean royalty. Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann was certainly aware of thecachet of her European patron and traded on this connection by bringing aletter of introduction from Alexandra the Princess of Wales. Princess Alexan-dra was connected to two European royal households, being the daughter ofthe Danish king, Christian IX, and having married into the house of Windsoras the wife of the heir to the British throne in 1863.23 Nazlı and the youngPrincess of Wales had met earlier in 1869 when Nazlı hosted PrincessAlexandra’s visit to her harem as part of a British royal tour to the OttomanEmpire (Figure 3 shows a photograph of Princess Alexandra that was takenby the Abdullah Frères studio while she was in Istanbul). In his role as one ofthe senior men of the Ottoman bureaucracy (and member of the Egyptianruling family), Nazlı’s father Mustafa Fazıl often entertained visiting Euro-pean dignitaries in Istanbul, and their wives were sometimes invited to meetthe senior women of his family. Although not the most powerful woman inher father’s household, Nazlı had her own domain within his yalı in Kandilli.The entire second storey was designated for her use. She had fifteen femaleslaves at her command and regularly entertained in her vast suite of roomsthat included a reception room, great library and concert hall elegantlyappointed in a European style with crystal chandeliers, carved chairs, a barrelorgan and Erhard piano.24 When Jerichau-Baumann first visited Nazlı shewas already becoming known for her soirées at which the highest levels ofelite local and foreign women were entertained. Indeed, 1869 was a busy yearduring which she entertained Princess Alexandra and the French EmpressEugénie, and held a concert in honour of the visit of an Italian contessa.Acknowledgement of the status of the Egyptian dynasty by elite foreigners,

such as European royalty, was one of the ways of confirming their legitimacy.Nazlı was a member of the Egyptian Khedive’s family and recognition withinOttoman culture of their status as the ruling family of Egypt was relativelyrecent. Her great grandfather Muhammad Ali Pasha had established a

22 Mustafa Fazıl Paşa owned a number of large homes in the Ottoman capital in Kandilli,Beyazıt, Çamlıca and Paşabahçe Sultan Tepe. For a photograph and floor plan of hisyalı in Kandilli, built for his daughters Nazlı and Azize, see Tanman, From the Shores ofthe Nile to the Bosphorus, 159 and 161.

23 The Danish Royal Collections: Amalienborg Christian VIII’s Palace (Copenhagen: DeDanske Kronologiske Samling 1994).

24 Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede Rejsebilleder (Copenhagen: Forlagsbureauet 1881),21. Enid Layard writes about her regular visits to Nazlı in her yalı in Kandilli in EnidLayard, Twixt Pera and Therapia: The Constantinople Diaries of Lady Layard, ed. SinanKuneralp (Istanbul: Isis Press 2010).

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Figure 3 Abdullah Frères, Alexandra Princess of Wales, 1869 (from Bahattin Öztuncay,Hâtıra-i Uhuvvet: Portre Fotografların Cazibesi: 1846–1950 (Istanbul: Aygaz 2005), 105)

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hereditary right to rule only in 1841, and the Egyptian royal household didnot therefore have the centuries-old legitimacy of the Ottoman royaldynasty.25 The Muhammad Ali family modelled the structure of their royalhouseholds on the Ottoman palace in Istanbul, and yet continued to strugglewith them to secure their legitimacy and autonomy. Certainly one of thechallenges was to develop an alternative vocabulary legitimating their sover-eign status, and portraiture was one way of doing this.The issue of status was additionally tenuous for Nazlı’s branch of the

family. Her father was living in exile in Istanbul because his right as heir to theEgyptian governorship had been revoked following a change in the law,decreed by Sultan Abdülaziz, that established primogeniture as the principleof inheritance within the Egyptian ruling dynasty. Given this context, forNazlı to be unequivocally acknowledged by the wife of the heir to the Britishthrone was an important confirmation of her status. Similarly, to engage aportraitist who was a painter to European royalty, a most unusual step for anelite Ottoman woman of her generation, could thus have been an affirmationof her own elite social standing. Such an argument seems to be confirmed bylater accounts of Nazlı’s practice in Cairo of filling her living room with photoportraits of foreign royalty and leading heads of state whom she had metthroughout her life.26 Reports by British visitors show that Nazlı crowded thespace with photographs and newspaper clippings, a lifetime’s accumulationdisplayed in such profusion that it seemed excessive, even to those familiarwith the clutter of Victorian drawing rooms.27

25 On the rule of the Muhammad Ali Pasha dynasty, see Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, AShort History of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985); AfafLutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press 1984); and Ehud R. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990).

26 Nazlı had many friends within foreign diplomatic circles. Enid Layard’s diaries revealhow close Nazlı was to her and her husband Henry Layard when he was the Britishambassador in Istanbul from 1877 to 1880. See Layard, Twixt Pera and Therapia.

27 Ronald Storrs describes her home as follows: ‘Every table was loaded withphotographs glazed but not framed, and so was the old concert grand completewith pianola attachment. There must have been near a thousand photographs inthe room; as well as richly framed pictures of the British Royal Family, The SultanAbd al-Hamid, Lord Kitchener, Lord Grenfell and Lord Cromer. Not only thenumerous gilt screens, but every inch of the four walls of the vast apartment, werecovered with pasted pages of the illustrated papers, enabling you when bored withyour neighbour to con the history of the past twenty years over his shoulder’: RonaldStorrs, The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs (New York: Arno Press 1972), 98. AmédéeBaillot de Guerville describes it as follows: ‘We took tea in the large salon, where thefurniture, tables and the walls are covered with photographs of relations, friends,Sovereigns, and celebrities, of whom the Princess whilst smoking uninterruptedly,cigarette after cigarette, spoke volubly, sometimes in English, sometimes in French’:Amédée Baillot de Guerville, New Egypt, revd edn (London: William Heinemann1906), 137.

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From the artist’s account of these early portrait sittings it is evident that, forNazlı, it was not just the prestige of being painted that engaged her; she wasalso fascinated by the process of painting itself. Jerichau-Baumann writes thatNazlı often sat next to her watching her paint.28 In 1880, the year after herhusband’s death, Nazlı’s own art came to public prominence. She exhibitedfour still-life paintings at the inaugural exhibition of the ABC club (Artists ofthe Bosphorus and Constantinople). This salon incorporated the work ofEuropean and Ottoman painters, including Amadeo Preziosi’s Turkish Womenin the Bazaar and Osman Hamdi Bey’s İki Müzisyen Kız (Figure 4), and washeld at the Greek Girls’ School on the shores of the Bosphorus in Tarabya.This event was one in a significant series of exhibitions for the development ofeasel painting in Ottoman Istanbul, and Nazlı’s participation in it issuggestive of her prominent engagement in this artistic milieu.29

For her part, upon returning to Europe, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann wenton in 1875 to paint a work inspired by her visit entitled The Princess NaziliHanum (Figure 5). In it Nazlı is represented, according to the familiarOrientalist stereotype of the odalisque, as an alluring object of desire.Reclining negligently on a couch in a pose that casually reveals her breaststhrough the folds of pink gauzy fabric, this harem princess offers herself tothe viewer and invites them to engage in a game of erotic seduction as shecasually strokes the head of her pet monkey. Her attentive African maidpoised behind the princess is ensconced within the opening folds of asplendid diaphanous curtain. The compressed space of this interior is densewith luxurious, exotic fabrics and furnishings that spill beyond the loweredge of the canvas thus intimately involving the viewer in the fictionalharem scene. As such, this harem painting is diametrically opposed toJerichau-Baumann’s earlier honorific portraits produced in collaboration withNazlı herself.30 This is precisely the western Orientalist stereotype of theharem woman that Nazlı’s next photograph (Figure 6) was to parody.

28 Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede Rejsebilleder, 25.29 Sema Öner, ‘Tanzimat Sonrası Osmanlı Saray Çevresinde Resim Etkinliği’, Ph.D.

dissertation, Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul, 1991; Sema Öner, ‘The role of theOttoman palace in the development of Turkish painting following the reforms of 1839’,National Palaces, no. 4, 1992, 58–77. For an account of the Istanbul exhibitions, seeMustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batı’ya açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2 vols (Istanbul: Erol Kerim AksoyKültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık vakfı yayınları 1995), II, 422–45, and Mary Roberts,‘Genealogies of display: cross-cultural networks at the 1880s Istanbul exhibitions’, inZeynep İnankur, Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts (eds), The Poetics and Politics of Place:Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Istanbul: Pera Museum 2011), 127–42.

30 For analysis of this painting in the context of Jerichau-Baumann’s other Orientalistwork, see Peter Nørgaard Larsen, ‘Fra nationalromantisk bondeliv til Orientensharemsmystik: Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann i dansk og europæisk 1800-tals kunst’, inElisabeth Jerichau Baumann, exhibition catalogue, Øregaard Museum and FynsKunstmuseum (Hellerup: Øregaard Museum and Odense: Fyns Kunstmuseum1997), 8–23, and Birgitte von Folsach, By the Light of the Crescent Moon: Images of theNear East in Danish Art and Literature, 1800–1875 (Copenhagen: David Collection1996), 86.

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Figure 4 Osman Hamdi Bey, Iki Müzisyen Kız (Two Musician Girls), 1880, oil on canvas,58 x 39 cm (courtesy of Suna and Inan Kıraç Foundation, Orientalist Painting Collection,Istanbul)

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Figure 5 Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, The Princess Nazili Hanum, 1875, oil on canvas,132 x 158 cm (private collection, photograph by Jenni Carter)

Figure 6 Photographer unknown, Princess Nazlı Hanım, n.d. (courtesy of StaffordshireRecord Office)

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Nazlı did not pursue a public career as a painter, but neither did shedisappear without trace. After the death of her first husband she moved toCairo and was actively engaged in the cultural life of that city. There sheconducted a distinguished salon in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury where Arab nationalists, advocates for women’s rights, British colo-nialists such as Kitchener and Cromer, and other members of the social elitewere welcomed. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot notes that Princess Nazlı’s salonwas one of the three famous salons in late nineteenth-century Cairo in whichthere were signs of political activity.31 Her role in Egyptian society hasensured her a place in Egyptian feminist histories as a key precursor to theemergent Egyptian women’s movement.32 Accounts of Nazlı’s life in Cairoappeared in the press, including an article in the Arabic journal al-Muqtataf of1897 praising her recently published book.33

In this period of her life, probably the 1880s, she produced her mostunusual photographic self-portraits: this pair of photographs is held in ananonymous album in the Staffordshire Record Office in England. Against thesame studio backdrop of pyramid and palm trees, the Egyptian princess haschoreographed two distinct representations: on the left, an honorific portraitin contemporary European dress and, on the right, a cross-dressed parody ofthe western harem stereotype.Nazlı’s upright bearing and direct look in the image on the left conveys an

ease and confidence, indicating that she has taken command of the sitting; itis as if she is opening up a conversation with the viewer. Here is a self-assuredwoman addressing her viewer as an equal. Like her earlier carte de visite,Nazlı’s honorific portrait expresses this desire to communicate with herviewer. However, the companion portrait is a photograph of a very differentorder. This is a confrontational photograph of Nazlı cross-dressed as anOttoman gentleman, her companion dressed as an Egyptian pottery seller,posed as though part of Nazlı’s imaginary harem in a parodic restaging of thewestern harem stereotype. The context for production of both photographsremains a mystery, but they invite speculation. Perhaps Nazlı visited thephotographer’s studio to commission the left-hand portrait and decided toplay with the props that she found there. Perhaps she is parodying the other‘harem’ photographs produced in the studio in which this photograph wastaken. Nazlı had previously entertained this game of cross-dressing in thephotographer’s studio in a double portrait in which she is wearing a fez and

31 Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt and Cromer: A Study in Anglo-Egyptian Relations(London: John Murray 1968), 95.

32 See, for example, Roger Allen, ‘Writings of members of “the Nazlı circle”’, Journal of theAmerican Research Center in Egypt, vol. 8, 1969–70, 79–84; Michelle Raccagni, ‘Origins ofFeminism in Egypt and Tunisia’, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1983, 81–3;and Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995).

33 al-Muqtataf, vol. 21, 1897. Princess Nazlı is also mentioned in Horace R. Humbold,Recollections of a Diplomatist, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold 1902), II, 331–2.

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her sister Azize sports a beret.34 But what distinguishes the cross-dressedphotograph in the Staffordshire album is its sustained parody of theEuropean harem stereotype. Here she plays her role as harem master againstthe painted backdrop, and the theatricality of these two figures burlesques thestaginess of the stereotypical Orientalist ‘harem’ photograph. This irreverentperformativity is a powerful testament to the agency of Princess Nazlı, andprofoundly challenges any notion of the silence or passivity of Ottoman-Egyptian women that is implied in the more familiar image of harem womenthat was so popular in Europe.

It is likely that these photographs were a gift to an English friend, a ‘MissLaing’, whose own photograph appears on the same album page beneathNazlı’s double portrait. Through this gift, Nazlı sent a satiric missive toEngland parodying the seemingly limitless western fascination with the ideaof the seraglio. In this way she emerges as a figure of resistance to a dominantscopic regime: she presents herself as a sophisticated, visually literate instig-ator of the clichéd codes of Orientalist visual culture who rewrites these codesas satire. With whom did she share this joke? Certainly with her photographiccollaborators and, in all likelihood, with other elite Ottoman-Egyptian womenwho would have enjoyed her travesty. And, to be sure, with the English friendto whom she presumably gave the photographs. It is thus tempting to imaginethat these portraits constituted a shared joke between the two women aboutthe propensity for other Europeans to subscribe to the stereotype of theodalisque. Such an interpretation underscores shared female networks ofcosmopolitan elites across cultures. In any case, this photograph bespeaks animpatience with a western attitude that returns dialogue to monologue, andthat reifies the Egyptian princess as an ‘odalisque’ of western fantasy.35

A different set of alliances are evident in the final photograph (Figure 7)that more directly engages Nazlı’s biography with Ottoman political history.The printed signature of Mulnier’s Parisian photographic studio on the mountboard of this carte is a clear indication that Nazlı did realize her desire to visitParis that she had expressed twenty-two years earlier in the letter with whichI began this article. In this photograph she is pictured alongside Ahmed RizaBey and encased in her fashionable plaid coat and plumed hat. As an intimatephotograph of two friends of opposite gender, this is yet another very un-conventional photograph of an Ottoman-Egyptian woman of this period. It isalso a more direct statement of political allegiance than any of her earliercartes because her companion here is also the leader of the Paris branch of the

34 This photograph is reproduced in Tanman, From the Shores of the Nile to theBosphorus, 306.

35 For a more extended analysis of the Staffordshire photographs, see Mary Roberts,‘Oriental dreams’, in Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, 143–9. For an analysis of otherOttoman photographic parodies of the western stereotype of the harem, see NancyMicklewright, ‘Harem/house/set: domestic interiors in photography from the lateOttoman world’, in Marilyn Booth (ed.), Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and LivingSpaces (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2010), 239–60.

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Figure 7 Ferdinand Mulnier, Ahmed Riza Bey and Princess Nazlı Hanım, Paris, c. 1896.(from Bahattin Öztuncay, Hâtıra-i Uhuvvet: Portre Fotografların Cazibesi: 1846–1950(Istanbul: Aygaz 2005), 155)

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Young Turk opposition movement, critics of the regime of Sultan Abdülha-mid II. While in Paris in 1896, Nazlı attended a meeting of the Young Turkishcommittee and after the meeting, in a gesture with obvious echoes of herfather’s earlier support for the Young Ottomans in Paris in the 1860s, she isreputed to have addressed a ‘firmly worded letter’ to the Sultan.36 Presum-ably it is at this stage that Nazlı and Ahmed Riza Bey collaborated to createthis photograph.

As with her earlier portrait gifted to the artist Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann,Nazlı has autographed this photograph. However, this time her name isinscribed in Latin and Ottoman script. Nazlı had also used the dual signaturein her very earliest photographs at the age of sixteen. Significantly, in one ofthese photographs in which Nazlı is wearing a fez and her sister, a beret, it isonly Nazlı who chose to sign the album page, although the names of both arealso written in rık’a, cursive script.37 What are we to make of these distinctivechoices? Coming from an Ottoman Islamic tradition in which signatures wererarely used, these decisions are highly significant, indicating, as Edhem Eldemhas argued in another context, a will to modernize.38 Nazlı’s photographicsignature personalized the portrait gift to her European artist friend, ElisabethJerichau-Baumann (Figure 1) and, by signing in Latin script, she signalled herintimacy with western conventions. Yet, with her later photograph (Figure 7),more likely destined for an Ottoman recipient, the signatures signify afamiliarity with European culture while also affirming the distinctiveness ofboth sitters as educated Ottoman and Ottoman-Egyptian elites. This distinc-tion is congruent with the guiding principles of the Young Turks thatsynthesized western positivism with anti-imperialism.39

Transgressive invention

Taken together, one of the most striking things about this series of portraits,which Nazlı commissioned at various stages of her life, is their transgressiveinventiveness. This is transgression as Said defines it with an emphasis oncrossing boundaries, testing and challenging limits and cutting across

36 Karl Blind, ‘Young Turkey’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 66 (Old Series), 1896, 830–43 (837)(reprinted in Living Age, vol. 212, no. 2741, 16 January 1897, 163–73 (168)). Documentsin the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul (Y.PRK.EŞA 30/43, HR.SYS 192/62, Y.A.HUS. 282/112 and Y.PRK.ZB.12/42) reveal that in this decade Nazlı’s activities wereintermittently monitored by Sultan Abdülhamid’s authorities because of her politicalassociations.

37 See Tanman, From the Shores of the Nile to the Bosphorus, 302 and 306.38 Edhem Eldem, ‘Culture et signature: quelques remarques sur les signatures de clients

de la Banque Impériale Ottomane au début du XXe siècle’, Études turques et ottomanes:documents de travail, no. 2, 1993, 63–74.

39 See Hanioğlu’s analysis of ‘The political ideas of the Young Turks’, in M. ŞükrüHanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York and Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress 1995), 200–12.

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expectations. Nazlı’s inventiveness is apparent both in terms of her cannyexperimentation with the visual codes of photography, most notably in theStaffordshire album photographs with her playful performative doubling ofhonorific portraiture and harem parody. But her inventiveness is also apparentin the various ways she deployed her portraits as tokens of cultural exchange,both within her own culture and with her European interlocutors. Nazlı’sengagement with this visual technology situates her at the intersection of theoften-separated domains of emergent Egyptian nationalism, Ottoman polit-ical reform, western Orientalist art and a proto-feminist moment of Egyptianwomen’s history. Nazlı’s relationship to the European portrait tradition is lessabout opposition than a contrapuntal engagement in the Saidean sense ofsimultaneous voices that sound against, as well as with, each other. As wehave seen, Nazlı was perfectly capable of adopting an adversarial stance andyet most often her mode of engagement is characterized by an openness todialogue, engagement in a contrapuntal mode.Within this body of work and the historical narrative I have been tracking

of their movement across and between different cultural domains, ElisabethJerichau-Baumann’s fantasy painting of Princess Nazlı stands as a salutaryreminder that even those European artists involved in the production ofalternative images of elite Ottoman women could participate in perpetuatingdemeaning harem stereotypes. As such, this is a reminder that, with this turntowards a more nuanced, participatory model of cultural exchange, in ourunderstanding of the intersections between Ottoman and Orientalist visualculture in the late nineteenth century, we need to keep in mind the power ofthe western fantasy and thus the continuing relevance of Said’s earlier critiquein his seminal text Orientalism. At the same time, however, Princess Nazlı’sown persistent efforts to revise such erroneous stereotypes indicate that thiscritique is not only a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon butthat it emerged from within nineteenth-century visual culture at theinstigation of some of the very women who were supposedly the embodimentof such tropes.

Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art at theUniversity of Sydney, and the author of Intimate Outsiders: The Harem inOttoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke University Press 2007).She has co-edited four books: The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbuland British Orientalism (Pera/University of Washington Press 2011), Edges ofEmpire (Blackwell 2005), Orientalism’s Interlocutors (Duke University Press2002) and Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (PowerPublications 2000, 2012). Her latest book, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans,Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, is forthcoming from Uni-versity of California Press. Email: mary.roberts@sydney.edu.au

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