Painter Osman Hamdi Bey, who lived in the last period of the Ottoman Empire, is a successful painter, sculptor, archaeologist, art historian, educator and statesman. He has taken the early modernization steps of Turkish painting. His contributions to Turkish art and culture cannot be denied. He was the first painter to do figüre and portrait works in his period. Osman Hamdi Bey tried to explain the East in the most accurate way with his Orientalist-style paintings on the subject of important historical structures in Turkey and tried to break the prejudices of the West over the East. In his Works, he included in particular the splendor of the East. Because he uses sections of historical sites one-on-one in some of his Works, these Works are document. In some of his Works, he also provides information about Turkish culture and life through fiction. The artist often included masques, shrines and mansions in his paintings. In his figüre studies, he glorified women in everyday and social life by using women. He tried to emphasize the place of women in society. In his female figures, he portrayed the woman as cultural, social and well- groomed, reading rather than being meta. He used his wife and daughter as models in the female figures he used. In this study, four paintings of Osman Hamdi Bey’s women- themed Works were examined through semiotic analysis and an attempt was made to determine the unity of language, suject and style used in the paintings.
Keywords: Semiotics, Osman Hamdi Bey, art of painting, female image, Orientalism