Valentine for Perfect Strangers

A Salon exhibition held in the Grand Palais in Paris on May 1, 1906 showcased an Ottoman painting. This was Osman Hamdi Bey’s famous “Tortoise Trainer”. 

Martín Zapater y Clavería, born in Zaragoza on November 12th 1747, came from a family of modest merchants and was taken in to live with a well-to-do aunt, Juana Faguás, and her daughter, Joaquina de Alduy. He studied with Goya in the Escuelas Pías school in Zaragoza from 1752 to 1757 and a friendship arose between them which was to last until the death of Zapater in 1803. 

Men were the first nudes in Turkish painting. The majority of these paintings were academic studies executed in oil paint; they were part of the education of artists that had finally attained the opportunity to work from the live model. The gender of the models constituted an obstacle in the way of characterizing these paintings as ‘nudes’.