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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tAfter its 1895 purchase, At the Mosque Door<\/em> was literally rolled up and placed in storage, Emily Neumeier, an assistant professor of art history at Philadelphia\u2019s Tyler University, told ARTnews<\/em>. While the painting was known to exist, according to Neumeier, who specializes in the Ottoman Empire, its location was listed as unknown in various publications, including a comprehensive catalogue of the artist\u2019s work. It was rediscovered only in 2007, after which the school brought Neumeier on to research the painting\u2019s history.<\/p>\n \n\tUPenn has seen some financial challenges, especially under the Trump administration. In February 2025, the National Institutes of Health implemented funding cuts that stood to cost the university some $240 million, resulting in threats to hundreds of jobs and a reduction in graduate program cohort sizes. <\/p>\n \n\tBut some observers are unhappy about the sale.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAt the very least, this situation should open up a larger and more serious discussion about unaccessioned objects in museum collections and how they should be handled when they fall outside typical \u2018deaccession\u2019 procedures and decisions,\u201d Christiane Gruber, professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, told ARTnews<\/em> in an email. \u201cThe nebulousness allows a lack of public scrutiny and accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI think it\u2019s a shame and a missed opportunity,\u201d Neumeier added in an email.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Penn Museum declined a request for an interview for this article.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Ottoman artist, who was appointed to a high position in his country\u2019s government, found himself in an exceptionally powerful position to exert control over Western archaeological expeditions in the Ottoman empire, including one at Nippur by the Penn Museum. And in fact, At the Mosque Door<\/em> itself proved to play an essential role in the early development of the collection of the Penn Museum, which was founded in 1887 and now housing over a million \u201cextraordinary artifacts and archaeological finds.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tOsman Hamdi was informally trained in Paris by French Academic artist Gustave Boulanger and was influenced by the Orientalist work of Jean-L\u00e9on G\u00e9rome. Bonhams describes him as \u201cone of the first Ottoman artists to bridge the artistic worlds of Turkey and France.\u201d He returned to Turkey in 1868 and became that country\u2019s director of foreigners issues in Iraq until 1871, after which he returned to Constantinople in 1871 and resumed his artistic career. Ten years later he would be appointed head of the city\u2019s newly formed Archaeology Museum and successfully got a law passed that forbade the export of archaeological finds, ensuring a strong collection for the country; he also pushed through legislation that gave him the authority to give the thumbs-up or -down to Western powers\u2019 requests to conduct digs, Neumeier points out.<\/p>\n \n\tIn Neumeier\u2019s view, Osman Hamdi was a \u201cfascinating individual\u201d and a Renaissance man.\u00a0\u201cHe comes from a family of bureaucrats and diplomats,\u201d she said. \u201cHis father wanted him to be a lawyer but he went off to France to study and decided he wanted to be a painter, to his family\u2019s great alarm.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe painting has a fascinating life story, as Neumeier uncovered, bound up in the history of archaeology and the meeting of East and West. At the Mosque Door <\/em>was first shown at the International Art Exposition in Berlin in 1891, along with two other of Osman Hamdi\u2019s paintings, one of which the French state bought in a move Bonhams describes as likely aiming to curry favor with the artist so it could continue to excavate in Ottoman lands.<\/p>\n \n\tThe towering canvas then traveled to the World\u2019s Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World\u2019s Fair, in 1893. The recently formed Penn Museum bought it directly from the artist two years later, again in a play for favor, as noted in the minutes of museum meetings, says Neumeier\u2014in this case to ensure that the school\u2019s ongoing excavations at Nippur would be allowed to continue. Indeed, Osman Hamdiwould later give the museum a collection of important cuneiform tablets. The canvas then disappeared, until it was rediscovered just a few years ago.<\/p>\n \n\tSince then it has had a busy few years. In 2010\u201311, it hung at the Penn Museum in the show \u201cArchaeologists and Travelers in Ottoman Lands,\u201d for which Neumeier was part of the curatorial team. The following year it was featured in \u201cOsman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archaeology, Diplomacy, Art,\u201d at Istanbul\u2019s Pera Museum, and then in 2018 at Philadelphia\u2019s Arthur Ross Gallery in \u201cThe World on View: Objects from Universal Expositions.\u201d Now it heads to the auction block, possibly to disappear into private hands forevermore.<\/p>\n \n\tThe painting shows the main entrance to the Muradiye Mosque at Bursa, but seems to depict an imaginary scene. The painting has \u201call the expected intense colors and key Orientalist tropes,\u201d says Bonhams, including women in feraces, a typical 19th-century overcoat. The artist signed his name in Arabic script on the spine of a book shown on the canvas, and painted himself into the scene no less than three times: as a cross-legged beggar, the turbaned man standing next to him, and as a man in the foreground, rolling up his sleeve.<\/p>\n \n\tFor museums to sell artworks, they typically have to demonstrate that they are redundant, or of inferior quality, or outside the scope of the institution\u2019s collection. Proceeds can be used only to acquire more artwork or for the \u201cdirect care\u201d of existing collections. Going outside these guidelines incurs penalties from organizations like AAMD and AAM, with museums possibly losing accreditation or the possibility of borrowing artworks from other member institutions. Donors, it is widely thought, may be less likely to consider giving their treasures to museums if they are concerned they will be liquidated in a cash crunch, even a severe one. In an informative guide, the AAM writes that \u201cThe collections aren\u2019t there to preserve the museum; the museum is there to preserve the collections.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tProfessional organizations offered differing statements to ARTnews <\/em>about the sale. <\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAAMD\u2019s professional practices deals with accessioned works of art and not property held by a museum or its governing body (like a university),\u201d said AAMD spokesperson Sascha D. Freudenheim in an email, and AAM \u201cdoes not have any guidelines on selling works that have not been formally accessioned by a museum,\u201d said a spokesperson. But Kristina Durocher, president of the executive committee of the Association of Academic Museums and galleries, weighed in by email, saying, \u201cIt is regrettable the Penn Museum would sell a significant work of art that embodies its institutional history\u2014AAMG maintains that works of art held by academic institutions should not be treated as fungible assets regardless of their status nor should the proceeds from the sale of works of art be used to fund university operations.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFor Neumeier, the academic who researched the painting\u2019s provenance, the situation has echoes of another local deaccessioning story, when the Thomas Jefferson University board voted in 2006 to sell Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins\u2019 painting The Gross Clinic<\/em> (1875) to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, then under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas, for $68 million, a record price for a pre\u2013World War II American artwork. Public outcry resulted, and local organizations and Wachovia Bank raised money to match that amount and purchase the work in order to keep it in Philadelphia, where it is co-owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.<\/p>\n \n\tIt may be true that the painting falls outside of the Penn Museum\u2019s purview of \u201cartifacts and archaeological finds,\u201d as its collection is described on its website, but, says Neuemier, \u201cThe painting was foundational to the establishment of the museum, which was founded to house materials excavated from Nippur.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tEven though she was the expert called in to research the painting\u2019s history, which Bonhams now touts in promoting the work, Neuemier only recently learned of the sale.\u00a0She finds the move unfortunate, especially in view of the painting\u2019s historical importance.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe story of the painting shows the entangled history and the birth of modern archaeology,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a key work in telling that story.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThis would be an easy win,\u201d she continued. \u201cThe museum could exhibit it and put it front and center and make it about the foundation of the museum. The story also shows the agency of Osman Hamdi Bey. It nuances the idea of Western archaeologists in Ottoman lands. In the purchase of this painting, Osman Hamdi very much has the upper hand, and they\u2019re scrambling to curry favor with him. This is not a straightforward story about Western people exploiting the people of Western Asia.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere was a really nice quote from Osman Hamdi reported in a letter to the museum, when he decided to gift the tablets,\u201d pointed out Neumeier: \u201cYou could get these objects from me by force [but] you have decided to use persuasion,\u201d the artist wrote. \u201cPersuasion works always better with me than force, which I resist.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/orientalist-painting-philadelphia-penn-museum-auction-1234777819\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Penn-Museum-Exterior-Eric-Sucar-1.jpg?w=1024″] American universities facing financial crunches come under fire when they either close their art museums or sell paintings from their collections to narrow a budget gap. Just in the last few years, Chicago\u2019s DePaul University, Indiana\u2019s Valparaiso University, and Pennsylvania\u2019s Albright College have alienated donors and their respective school communitues in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1842023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1842023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1842023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1842023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1842023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\t\tThe Artist Held the Key to Western Archaeological Research\t<\/h2>\n
\n\t\tA Gray Area in Museum Ethics?\t<\/h2>\n
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