ABSTRACT
Four photographs taken in the early 1890s document British Consul William Henry Wrench’s superb collection of Islamic art. They show his Istanbul home crowded with thirteenth to nineteenth-century Ottoman and Persian treasures alongside contemporary Ottoman and European paintings and a cluster of timepieces. The aesthetics of this display connects the interwoven transcultural time of Istanbul’s modernity to multiple pasts, encompassing both Ottoman and orientalist aesthetics. Through these photographs we see that the life of objects in this room was riven by the collaborative and conflicting aesthetic, religious and temporal cultures of foreign and local elites in the late Ottoman Imperial capital.
The timepieces in Wrench’s collection cue us to the complex temporal culture of the Ottoman capital in this period and the multilayered metaphorics of time in Wrench’s installation. Three modes of marking time operative in 1890s Istanbul are legible in these photographs: the conjunction of Ottoman timepieces, the aesthetics of modern historical time in Osman Hamdi’s tomb painting (its numinous aesthetics), and the sound of the call to prayer inscribe the pleated temporality of Ottoman modernity into this photographic space. Accordingly, an interior that might readily be dismissed as orientalist eclecticism comes to us across time, as an Istanbul zone of cultural contact in which are created entangled Ottoman and Orientalist histories of what would later be called Islamic art. Reading Wrench’s Istanbul interior proleptically, I argue that this late nineteenth-century installation anticipates our own historiographic moment as historians of Islamic art grapple with the status of modern art in a sub-field from which it had previously been marginalized.
