Reading Turkish Maritime Painting: Changes in Visual Narratives in the Early Turkish RepublicJoshua ParkerThe International Journal of the Humanities 6.6, 2008 (115-20).

The experience of reading in Turkey underwent a dramatic

change on January 1, 1929 when, overnight, the country’s

literacy rate suddenly plunged to nearly zero. On this date,

a November 3 decision of the country’s Grand National

Assembly went into effect, making it illegal to use the

Arabic alphabet to write in Turkish. As part of an effort to

harmonize linguistically with western Europe, newspapers,

books, signs and documents were printed with a new, hastily-

devised adaptation of Latin characters legible only to the

group of linguists Kemal Ataturk had hired to invent the new

phonetic alphabet. “By replacing the Arabic with the Latin

alphabet, Turkey turned consciously toward the West and

effectively severed a major link with a part of its Islamic

heritage [...] the alphabet reform cut it off from Turkey’s

Ottoman past, culture, and value system [...]” (Metz). An

excellent book and many articles have been written on the

various waves of Turkish language reforms of the 1920s to

1950s. This paper questions how the semiotics of visual

culture might also have changed during this period by

examining paintings and photographs of the era surrounding

it. Keeping in mind that language reforms were changes

devised by an elite culture, any related aesthetic changes

in visual culture were probably not reflected as much or as

quickly in popular visual culture, but were more rapidly and

strongly visible in elite forms of visual culture.

One of the first forums for public display of elite

visual images in Turkey dates to 1897, when Hasan Husnu

Pasha opened Istanbul’s first maritime museum, collecting

paintings, as well as ships, from various donors, including

the Sultan’s palace at Dolmabace, for public display. The

tradition of ship painting by Turkish military officers

themselves had been established in the mid-nineteenth

century (these officers were often among the few who were

able to travel to Europe for training in painting

techniques), and over the next half century, as the country

underwent military modernization, involvement in two world

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wars, and an expansive increase in modern ship-building,

Turkish artist-officials continued to provide the main

source of images for the museum’s collection.

In the visual arts, ships, like trains, cars, and other

modes of transportation (and unlike faces, monuments, or

houses) are rarely depicted from the front, but instead most

often from the side – a position inherently suitable for

portraying movement. Showing a vehicle from the side allows

an artist not only to document its length, which, usually

greater than its width, gives a clearer visual indication of

its actual size and capacity, but also allows an artist to

use the visual field to indicate the space where it has

been, and the space it moves into next. Of course,

traditional ships, with their sails out, or their steam,

flags, or smoke trailing, bear especially strong indications

of motion – and rarely is a ship portrait one of a ship at

rest. Movement is, after all, ostensibly a vehicle’s primary

function.

“Ostensibly,” because like other representations of

vehicles (automobile advertisements, railroad posters,

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equestrian scenes) images of ships also serve as symbols of

status, power, collective enterprise, and often of national

and social identity. The modes of transportation depicted in

such scenes function in at least two ways: providing users

physical liberty and the possibility of displacement,

allowing a passenger to attain a position in one place while

freeing himself from another, as his experience is

effortlessly drawn across space; they also symbolize the

source of this liberty, be it state or commercial, private,

military, aristocratic, or technological.

The fact that vehicles in motion are always leaving one

place and bound for another, and the combination of symbol

and movement in space and time in their images lends them

especially well to being devised and interpreted as

narratives. Movement across the visual field itself implies

the idea of the existence of more than one temporal space,

and the passage of time is perhaps the most basic element of

narrative. If there are always at least three temporal

points indicated in images of vehicles in motion (where the

vehicle has come from, where it is, and where it is going)

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the most succinct and precise definitions of narrative

likewise tend to concur: a narrative must make reference to

at least three moments in time.1 An image of a ship moving

across the sea may be iconic or simply provide documentary

information as to its function, capacity, or status, but it

always implies a story.

Efrat Biberman has explained that visual

representations invariably contain “visual” and “narrative”

aspects. The visual allows “a simultaneous observation of

it, in which the painting is spread out in front of the

viewer and she can see it fully.” The narrative aspect

“assumes that a temporal sequence can be attributed to a

picture despite its being viewed at a single point in time”

(238). And so, if indications of an element in a visual

representation’s displacement of over space also indicates

1 Werner Woolf and J. Petitot, working independently on eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetic theory, both cite Lessing’s work on the Laocöon as one of the earliest attempts at defining narrative. Lessing explains that the figures of the Laocöon “tell” a story thanks to the artist’s showing three figures at different stages between life and death. A concise example of high structuralist theory’s definition of narrative would be Gerald Prince’s A Grammar of Stories (1973), which explains the necessity of three “events” (two static and one active) that must follow each other chronologically. A revised definition appears in his “Surveying Narratology.”

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to the viewer its displacement over time, and thus tells a

story, how, exactly, is the motion of ships “read?” British

and French passenger ship advertisements of the 1880s-1930s,

for example, with the exception of advertisements for lines

specifically linking European ports to New York, typically

show the ship moving across the visual field from left to

right. Their images are “read” in the same direction the

viewer reads text in the Latin alphabet and, indeed, these

advertisements rely on accompanying text, as well.

Passengers advance as the advertisement’s accompanying text

advances. Modern, elegant, and efficient, these ships’

depicted progress itself represents the idea of progress,

carrying passengers across the visual field’s horizon from

their past to their future – which lies not in the distance

beyond, but to the right.2

2 Although a complete study, to this author’s knowledge, has not yet been undertaken, a fairly extensive search of Google images shows a postwar reverse in this trend – advertisements for cruise ships in the age of the airplane tend, by a large majority, to move across the visualfield in the opposite direction, from right to left, or to be shown fromabove. A survey of railroad posters from 1900 to 1940 shows the same trend, with a less marked percentage of left-to-right “movement,” as railroads and ocean steamers became not futuristic travel technology, but romantic vehicles reminiscent of the past, at least in the United States and Great Britain.

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Earlier forms of visual representation reveal a

surprising manipulation of compass direction in order to

portray narrative events chronologically in historical

scenes. A painting of the European taking of Buda from the

Turks (1686), now in the German Historical Museum, Berlin,

shows the artist’s willingness to ignore the rules of

ordinary conformation to historical representations of

battle scenes. The advancing European army moves through the

city from the left, leaving the Turkish army to retreat to

the right of the painting’s frame, corresponding to the

scene not as it would have been observed by the painter (the

viewer’s point of view sits among the retreating Turkish

troops to watch the Europeans advancing from a distance),

but as it might be viewed geographically, with the scene

laid out as a map, showing advance from the west and retreat

toward the east, an obvious reference to Europe’s Allied

expansion eastward from the west translated as a left to

right movement of both armies’ troops across the canvas.

Ships in the same painting, meanwhile, advance upriver, as

if coming toward the city from the southeast, echoing the

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motion of the land troops: ships advance across the visual

field from left to right, as do the soldiers on the river’s

banks, though they probably, in historical fact, came from

the opposite direction. The Relief of Vienna (1683), in the same

collection, shows a similar manipulation of historical

reality in order to give a sweeping view of an incursion

from the West (at the left of the canvas) into the East (on

the right). These scenes give not a faithful representation

of the action as it would have been viewed by a European

observer on the ground, but a symbolic representation that

serves a narrative of political geography better than

history.

European maritime scenes representing both general and

specific historical events often create the same symbolic

field for their moving elements. Two ship paintings

depicting scenes of nineteenth century German immigration to

the United States, for example, one offering a social

depiction in symbolic terms meant to represent an historical

movement in a single scene, the other documenting a specific

tragedy in this movement, illustrate this. Antoine Volkmar’s

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Emigrants’ Farewell (1860) shows the European shore to left,

with a boatload of departing passengers in a trajectory

toward the right. A child aboard waves back to the European

shore; an American flag hangs from a ship at dock to the

right of the scene. Here, though the voyage was western, and

might have been depicted with America to the left of the

canvas, as it would if it were a map, voyage west is instead

transcribed as a “forward” movement from left to right

across the canvas, as if it were an advancing written text.

In this intermediary space of the canvas, the boat’s

passengers are no longer quite Europeans, but not yet

Americans. Except for the waving child, only a “nobleman” on

the boat looks longingly back to the European shore. The

other passengers have their eyes locked firmly on the path

their boat is to take – toward their own futures, and their

future identities.

Again, “forward,” written text-like left-to-right

movement across the visual field is shown, this time

interrupted, in Joseph Carl Berthold Püttner’s Sinking of the

Emigrant Ship “Austria” on September 13, 1858 (1858). Here, a flaming

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ship originally bound for New York points to the right of

the canvas, while life boats (even those empty, overturned,

falling, or sinking) point left, in the direction of the

European shore. Of 542 passengers aboard, 89 survived,

rescued by a French and a Norwegian ship, shown in the far

left background of the painting, though these ships actually

intercepted the “Austria” mid-sea. Again, the “geographical”

map of the Atlantic has been redrawn for the viewer,

literally reversed, in terms of historical fact as well as

of depiction of space. The “future” of these narratives

(either accomplished or unattained) lies to the right of the

visual field, while the “past” is shown to the left. These

scenes (romanticized or documentary as the case may be) deal

with Europe’s relationship to America in spatial terms

indicating America as what is to be read “next” and Europe

as what is to be read as “before.”

I deal with European painting at such length here, and

particularly with German history painting depicting the

oriental and the extreme occident in relation to Europe, not

only because of European painters’ extensive influence on

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nineteenth and twentieth century Turkish painting, but also

because so many of Turkey’s earliest visual records of its

own social life and geography were created by Europeans, and

specifically by French and German painters and

photographers. Bearing in mind that European monogenetic

theory of the nineteenth century3 insisted that developing

areas of the world were not only geographically distanced

from Europe, but also temporally distanced – peoples there

represented Europe’s own cultural past – we should question

these visual narratives purporting to be historical

documents. In other words, if, for Europeans, travel to the

near East meant not only geographical displacement, but also

a voyage into the past, might not directional representation

of movement in these images reflect something in terms of

ideology?

One of the earliest large-scale documentary

representations of Ottoman Istanbul by Scandinavian painter

Claes Ralamb shows an imperial state procession through

Sultanhamet in around 1657. The intention of this series of

3 See Armstrong.

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paintings to serve as an historical document is underlined

by printed text beneath the scenes explaining the titles and

roles of the personages riding and marching in Sultan Mehmed

IV’s service. The disparity between the (European) textual

commentary below and the (Ottoman) images within the frame

itself is offset. The explanatory text runs from left to

right in Latin characters, framing the procession, which,

however, itself marches left – menacingly toward Europe, one

wonders, or into the past?

Since the aim of this article is to examine how

European images affected Turkish directional symbolism in

Turkey’s representations of its own nationhood, as

interesting as scenes showing movement between East and West

would be European portrayals of movement within the East

itself, which served as models to many Turkish visual

artists unable to travel to Europe for training. One of the

most well known of these images in Turkey today is Tristram

James Ellis’s Excursion on the Golden Horn (1888), in the Pera

Museum of Istanbul (Illustration 1). Within an urban

landscape, two women, an older and a younger, are rowed by

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two men, also a younger and older couple. Both women gaze

forward, to the boat’s unseen destination at the right of

the canvas, forming the main subject of the painting’s

foreground. The older man, the more traditionally-dressed of

the two, with his beard, looks left toward the backward

progress of the boat, while the young man looks right,

forward and westward toward the source of the scene’s light.

The woman looks at the young girl, who in turn looks

forward, exchanging a glance with the old man, who meanwhile

echoes with his white beard and turban the older woman’s

veils. So is the younger man the “absolute future” of the

entire tableau? And what lies beyond him? – the western eyes

that will ultimately consume the entire tableau. After all,

the ship is headed firmly in the geographic direction of

Europe, westward up the Golden Horn.

Fausto Zonaro’s Daughter of the English Ambassador Riding in a

Palanquin (1896, Illustration 2), meanwhile, portrays both

Turks and a westerner in a park above the urbanized shore of

the Bosphorus. Doubly framed and encased by the Turks

conveying her, and by the palanquin itself (a mode of

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transportation what would already have seemed anachronistic

to European viewers, as the vehicle’s use was outdated by

now by several generations), the woman and her attendants

move left. In modern dress herself, and protected from her

environment by glass panels, the passenger is literally

moved eastward, into a scene from the past, by her visit to

Istanbul.

A study of German scenic photography, now in the German

Archeological Institute in Istanbul4, shows an emphasis on

the city’s shoreline, generally limiting most depictions of

boats on the Bosphorus to background material for

foregrounded figures or buildings. An exception would be a

Panorama von Robert College (Illustration 3), where two ships

pass behind the contrasted new American college building and

a tower of the fifteenth century Rumeli castle, echoing

their implied exchange: mute, passing, one headed left, the

other right, seemingly animating and indicating the future

of the two structures in the foreground, where the college

building seems to break the boundary of the medieval

4 Similar photos are available in Genim 3-145.

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fortification. The ship echoing the position of the college

building is headed right, with the current toward the heart

of the city; the ruined tower’s corresponding ship heads

left upstream and outward toward the sea. The direction of

the ships is no surprise: Bosphorus traffic typically stays

to the right of the straits, allowing passage on the port

side. Yet the photographer’s choice of arrangement and of

this moment for pulling the shutter is no coincidence.

In Neue Brüke (1912, Illustration 4), a set of large

modern steamships pushes from the left of the frame into the

Karaköy port, as if portending to force the barrier of the

bridge into the Golden Horn, phallic smokestacks ready to

billow smoke; in the right distance of the Golden Horn

beyond the bridge, a group of smaller, old-fashioned

sailboats points left beneath a horizon of uneven hills and

mosques. Again, in Blick von Saray auf Kadikoy (Illustration 5), a

steamship heads into the right distance while small sailing

vessels putter left in the foreground beneath the smoke of

the departed steamship. In all three photographs,

technological modernity is starkly contrasted with

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romantically indigenous scenes. And while the two face each

other silently and seemingly contemplatively, movement, and

thus an instability in their coexistence, also seems

underlined.

To what extent this type of scenic photography affected

Turkish artists’ renditions of shore life and ships deserves

investigation, particularly given European painting’s

obvious influence on Turkish artists. Traditional Turkish

painting was for centuries modeled on the Iranian miniature,

which showed the visual field as flat – as flat as the

surface of the pages of the books they served to illustrate,

and which were the reason for the paintings’ small format:

under most of Ottoman rule, images were acceptable (and

during certain periods legal) only as a means of making

their accompanying texts’ messages clearer in books on

architecture, history, and medical practice.

Evidence of map-like, geographic arrangement of scenes

to reflect political actions clearly already exists in

large-scale Turkish history painting of the late nineteenth

and early twentieth century, when prohibitions were lifted.

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A depiction of Yavuz Sultan Selim’s incursion into the

Egyptian Nile Valley (Illustration 6) shows the sultan

leading his troops along a ridge above the valley and the

pyramids beyond from the top right corner of the canvas,

indicating his southwest movement from Turkey to Egypt, both

in terms of left-to-right and top-to-bottom movement. A

depiction of the sultan Suleiman’s return from the failed

Campaign of Belgrade (Illustration 7), meanwhile, shows him

facing a group of Turkish peasants to his right (east) while

looking grudgingly back over his shoulder to the left

(west). While these examples by no means provide an

exclusive corpus for interpreting Turkish history painting

of their period, they seem to model contemporary battle

scenes from the Turkish War for Independence, in which

military action is consistently and almost exclusively

directed toward the left (west) edge of the visual field.

The fights in these scenes, of course, are against the

threatening hegemony of colonizing European powers – but it

they also portrayed as a struggle toward modernity and an

independent future. As such, they tell the story of a nation

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coming into being – a story read, as Turkish texts of the

day were read, from right to left. The correspondence

between “forward” social and political progress and textual

progress is best illustrated in those which include

explanatory texts at the bottoms of their canvases (for

example, an unsigned and undated depiction of the 1897

Battle of Lamya).

Moving toward the middle of the twentieth century,

depictions of land battles decrease as depictions of battle

ships and sea battles increase. The years of the second

World War are marked by paysages psychologisés showing ships in

storms, generally plowing slowly right – continued progress

advances, slowed but not impeded by contemporary political

events. Documentary representations of sinking ships, with

crews escaping, tend to show the sinking vessel headed left,

with the escaping crew rowing right, throughout the years

1940-1945. An example would be “Sinking of the Refah” (1941,

Illustration 8). Geographic movement toward Europe now seems

to pull in the opposite direction.

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Did visual representation, which already in the

nineteenth century showed parallels with European portrayals

of space to create historical narratives based on

geographical positioning, undergo a shift as textual means

of communication changed in Turkey in the second quarter of

the twentieth century, following a European semiotics of

writing and visual expression? While it would certainly seem

that Europeans depended on the iconography set in paintings

from the eighteenth century in photographing Istanbul in the

twentieth, more research, and better availability of access

to and documentation of Turkish collections, is needed to

determine how and to what extent Turkish language reforms

had an effect on visual images within the country.5 Likely,

both semiotic methods of reading elite visual images

function at once: Turkey’s has modernization has

traditionally implied a movement toward the West, but at the

same time, language reform encourages viewers to “read” 5 Due to a closure of a large portion of the Maritime Museum’s painting collection, more precise data is not available. Museum curators and officials were unable to comment. Reproductions of a selection of paintings in the collection are available in: Engin Özdeniz. Turkish Naval Officer Painters. Translated by the Northern Naval Area Command HQ Protocol Office. Istanbul: Turkish Naval Forces Command (2000).

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images left-to-right. Finally, as recent political changes

in the country seem to indicate, “modernization” and

“Europeanization” do not necessarily go hand in hand.

“Modernizing” attempts by the state, it may well be,

encourage viewers to examine their own past, rather than

aping European models, when envisioning a future.

The emblem of Maritime Museum itself suggests the

inherent ambiguity of state symbols over a period of change.

Designed in 1897, it shows a clipper ship on the waves,

flags unfurled, but sails not yet raised, headed toward the

right of the museum’s insignia. To a reader of Ottoman text,

the emblem might indicate a vessel for taking one on a visit

backward, into an historical past. But for the reader of

contemporary Turkish, the movement indicated is rather that

of sailing forward, in a ship built for the past.

Works Cited:

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Selim Albatros. Sinking of the Refah. 1941. Military Museum, Istanbul.

Nancy Armstrong. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900. NY: Columbia UP (2005).

Battle of Lamya (1897). Undated. Military Museum, Istanbul.

Efrat Biberman. “On Narrativity in the Visual Field: A Psychoanalytic View of Velàzquez’s Las Meninas.” Narrative, 14.3 (2006) 237-253.

Blick von Saray auf Kadikoy. German Archeological Institute, Istanbul. Box 290.

Tristram James Ellis. Excursion on the Golden Horn. 1888. Pera

Museum, Istanbul.

Sinan Genim (curator). From Konstantiniyye to Istanbul: Photographs of the Rumeli Shore of the Bosphorus from the Mid XIXth to the XXth Century. Istanbul: The Pera Museum (2007). Catalogue.

Halil Kaymakam. Yavuz Sultan Selim. Undated. Military Museum,

Istanbul.

Man. Neue Brüke (Karakoy). 1912. German Archeological Institute,

Istanbul. Box 291.

Helen Chapin Metz, ed. Turkey: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress (1995). countrystudies.us/turkey/25.htm Accessed April 2008.

Sermet Muhtar. Return from Campaign of Belgrade 1521. 1912. Military Museum, Istanbul.

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Engin Özdeniz. Turkish Naval Officer Painters. Translated by the Northern Naval Area Command HQ Protocol Office. Istanbul: Turkish Naval Forces Command (2000).

Panorama von Robert College 2. German Archeological Institute, Istanbul. Box 269.

Gerald Prince. A Grammar of Stories. La Haye: Mouton (1973).

“Surveying Narratology.” Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, ed.s. What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. De Gruyter: Berlin (2003).

Joseph Carl Berthold Püttner. Sinking of the Emigrant Ship “Austria” on September 13, 1858. 1858. Historical Museum, Berlin.

Claes Ralamb. The Imperial Procession (Mehmed IV). After 1657. PeraMuseum, Istanbul.

The Relief of Vienna. 1683. German Historical Museum, Berlin. (unknown artist)

The Taking of Buda. 1686.German Historical Museum, Berlin.

(unknown artist)

Antoine Volkmar. Emigrants’ Farewell. 1860. German Historical

Museum, Berlin.

Fausto Zomaro. The Daughter of the English Ambassador Riding in a Palanquin. 1896. Pera Museum, Istanbul.

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