Osman Hamdi Bey painting sells for £1M, becomes top lot at London auction

A recently rediscovered painting by 19th-century Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey sold for £1 million ($1.3 million) at a London auction Tuesday, drawing strong interest from collectors and institutions.

Preparing Coffee, from 1881, resurfaced after more than a century in private European collections, known until recently only from a black-and-white photograph taken in the same year by renowned photographers Jean Pascal Sebah and Policarpe Joaillier.

The sale made it the highest-valued lot in an auction that saw 50 artworks sold in rapid succession.

It was acquired by an anonymous buyer through a phone bid.

First acquired around 1910 by Prince Sadiq Yadigarov, an art collector from Georgia, it passed to his son Archil, and then, around 1930, to a private collector in Vienna — related to Archil by marriage — where it remained by descent until 2008.

Since then, it has been held in another Austrian private collection until its recent emergence.

Set within a richly tiled, colonnaded interior — perhaps an imagined harem complex in Istanbul's Topkapi Palace — it depicts two young women preparing a ritual coffee.

The setting is fictional but constructed with exquisite attention to detail, a “sumptuous and jewel-like impression of luxe,” as Sotheby's catalogue describes it.

Born into an elite Ottoman family, Hamdi Bey was sent to Paris in the early 1860s to study law but instead found his calling in painting and archaeology.

By adopting Western artistic technique to depict Eastern subjects, Hamdi Bey not only responded to the growing 19th-century market for Orientalist art but also used his deep understanding of Muslim culture to create nuanced, respectful portrayals of Ottoman life.