This paper analyses Polish artist Stanisław Chlebowski’s fraught relationship with his own mobility. Nineteenth-century Istanbul was a refuge for Polish nationals in exile, like Chlebowski, who was appointed court painter to Sultan Abdülaziz in 1870.

Chlebowski’s home-studio, densely crowded with Polish and Ottoman treasures, displayed his cultural prowess that facilitated his entry into an international community of men of taste, but it was also the site of his uncertainty – betraying the psychological weight of his career wayfinding. As an expatriate in a city where the art audience was diverse and peripatetic, in a career phase when his patron was the leader of an empire that was not his own, Chlebowski struggled to forge an artistic identity. He falls between the cracks of national art histories.

My project reaches beyond national boundaries and renders Chlebowski a key figure in a revisionary, transcultural, and mobile history of Ottoman orientalist practice.

Presenter

Professor Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney.

Professor Roberts is a current Visiting Fellow with the HRC