Ebook: Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

In Istanbul Exchanges, Mary Roberts offers an innovative way of understanding Orientalism by shifting the focus from Europe to Istanbul and examining the cross-cultural artistic networks that emerged in that cosmopolitan capital in the nineteenth century. European Orientalist artists began traveling to Istanbul in greater numbers in this period, just as the Ottoman elite was becoming more engaged with European art. By the 1870s, a generation of Paris-trained Ottoman artists had returned to Istanbul with ambitions to reshape the visual arts.