Mihri Müşfik Hanım

Biography

In the late 1920s New York newspapers announced an exhibition by a “Turkish woman painter” at the George Maziroff Gallery. It was due to open on 26 November 1928. By then Mihri Müşfik Hanım had been in America a little over a year and had long been living far from the places of her birth.

She was born on 26 February 1886 in Istanbul, in the Rasim Pasha Mansion in the Kadıköy district. Her family came from the Abkhazian princely house of Achba. Her father, Ahmed Rasim Paşa, taught anatomy at the Military School of Medicine and headed it; he loved music and played the saz at evening gatherings. Her mother was Fatma Neşedil. Her younger sister, Enise, became the mother of the painter Hale Asaf.

Mihri had her first painting lessons from the Italian Orientalist painter Fausto Zonaro, in his studio in Beşiktaş. After that, the accounts present her as someone who quickly broke with the settled order of things. According to these accounts, she fell in love with the director of an acrobat company touring Istanbul, left for Rome and then Paris, evidently hoping to enter artistic circles. In Paris she settled in a flat in Montparnasse, earned her living from portraits and let one of the rooms to students. One of the tenants was Müşfik Selami Bey, who was studying politics at the Sorbonne; she married him, and the name by which she is known comes from that marriage. The date of the wedding is unknown; by one account the marriage lasted from 1905. In Paris she was introduced to the Ottoman finance minister Cavid Bey, who had come to negotiate with the French government after the Balkan Wars. He telegraphed the minister of education with a recommendation, and in 1913 Mihri was appointed drawing teacher at the Istanbul Teachers’ Training School for Girls. The following year the School of Fine Arts for Girls (İnas Sanâyi-i Nefîse Mektebi) opened, and Mihri became a teacher there and its director. Among her pupils are named Nazlı Ecevit, Aliye Berger and Fahrelnissa Zeid.

She was friends with the poets of the Edebiyat-ı Cedide (“New Literature”) circle, above all Tevfik Fikret. His house in Aşiyan served as her studio for a time. A remark of Fikret’s about her survives: she read his poems so well that he himself was surprised by their meaning.

In 1919 her visit to the journalist Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın and to the convicted former minister Cavid Bey drew criticism in the press. Together with her pupils she went to the offices of the newspaper Tanin and denied the accusations. Because of her closeness to the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling political party of the late Ottoman state, she left occupied Istanbul for Italy that same year. A year later she came back and taught at the school again. At the end of 1922 she went to Italy once more, and in 1923 she divorced. In Italy she had an affair with Gabriele D’Annunzio, to whom she had been introduced by the painter Renato Brozzi. Through D’Annunzio she was able to paint a portrait of the pope and to take part in restoring frescoes in a chapel. In letters to Brozzi in 1926 the poet recalled the “Turkish lady” with an Orientalizing smirk; I would read this as evidence of how her Italian colleagues saw her, without taking her seriously as a professional.

After the founding of the Republic she briefly returned to Turkey, painted a portrait of Atatürk and presented it to him in person at the Çankaya presidential residence in Ankara. Then came Rome, Paris and the United States: New York, Boston, Washington and Chicago. How and when she left Turkey and reached America is not well established. In 1938–1939 she worked at the World’s Fair in New York, and in those same years she painted a portrait of Rezzan Yalman, the wife of the journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman. According to some reports, during the Second World War she produced covers for New York magazines.

She spent her last years in poverty and died in 1954. She was buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island in New York.