Triangulating the material and cultural forces that connected the French Revolution, the French occupation of Egypt (1798-1801), and the Ottoman Empire’s New Order reforms (1792-1807) during the global Age of Revolutions (1760s-1820s), this dissertation examines portraiture’s varied and complex roles in the production of modern French and Ottoman subjectivities. As a genre of representation common to both early modern European and Ottoman pictorial traditions, portraiture emerges at this historical juncture as a vital mechanism for articulating new political subjectivities coordinated between French and Ottoman worlds. The pressures exerted on representation by the transcultural dialectics of social upheaval and empire-building that defined the global Age of Revolutions compelled portraiture across Cairo, Paris, and Istanbul to undergo radical adaptations of materials, meanings, and modalities to accommodate the demands of modern depiction.

This dissertation argues that French and Ottoman portraits in this period functioned as border regimes, systems essential to calibrating, classifying, and demarcating difference and affiliation. Oriented precisely against the understanding of these artworks as “hybridized” or “cross-cultural,” which sees in them the alloy of essentially distinct cultures, the border regime takes seriously portraiture’s unique capacities to produce and inscribe cultural contours, political aspirations, and social identities across inherited borders. Most importantly, the border regime acknowledges that any transgression of established cultural, political, or social barriers necessarily entails the erection of new ones. This dissertation demonstrates that the ostensibly cosmopolitan incorporations of “others” in portraiture’s production of new “selves” in French and Ottoman portraiture primarily served the inscription of new modes of hierarchical differentiation, transimperial competition, and chauvinist ideologies.

The account begins in French-occupied Cairo (1798-1801) with an examination of the ways French artists in the colony adapted subgenres of Revolutionary portraiture to represent the French and Ottoman-Egyptian subjects of the new Republican colony. The chapter focuses on a collection of painted and drawn portraits by the academic painter and draftsman André Dutertre. Dutertre came to Egypt as part of a large corps of French scientists, engineers, and artists who assisted the Revolutionary army in building France’s first sister republic in the Ottoman world. The French regime deployed portraiture alongside other colonial technologies, especially Orientalist philology, to interpellate Ottoman Egyptians and their Republican colonizers into new political and cultural affiliations serviceable to the ideology of the French colonial regime. This chapter also examines the local political and social terms on which colonized Egyptians engaged with Dutertre’s portraiture. Close analysis of Dutertre’s portraits and their Arabic inscriptions reveals that Egyptians sat for French artists to further indigenous political and social agendas. By centering the Ottoman conditions of possibility for French portraiture in Egypt, this chapter demonstrates that Dutertre’s portraits belong as much to the history of Ottoman political modernity as they do to the history of post-Revolutionary French colonialism.

Following the path of Ottoman-Egyptian refugees who immigrated to France after the collapse of the occupation in 1801, the account moves to Paris for a close analysis of Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Katchef Dahouth (1804). Girodet’s large-scale and publicly-exhibited oil portrait depicts an Ottoman-Egyptian Mamluk refugee recently retired from Napoleon’s corps of “Mamelouk” soldiers. This chapter provides an identification of Girodet’s sitter for the first time and outlines his biography in order to reconstitute the historical circumstances under which Ottoman refugees posed for French artists in the reactionary social environment of Napoleonic France. Girodet’s portrait avails itself of the conceptual and pictorial freedoms offered by portraiture during the Revolutionary period in order to transform the image of an individual Ottoman subject into a complex meditation on the Revolutionary meaning of the Egyptian occupation in the shadow of its collapse. In the process, the chapter offers a new genealogy of French Orientalist painting that not only foregrounds portraiture’s unique contributions, but illustrates Orientalism’s emergence out of discrete principles of post-Revolutionary academic painting. In examining the contributions of both artist and sitter to the portrait’s final form, the chapter recuperates the role of Ottoman refugees in the elaboration of Orientalist painting in early nineteenth-century France.

The account concludes in Istanbul, where in the same year that Girodet exhibited Dahouth in Paris, the Ottoman-Greek painter Kostantin Kapıdağlı completed his elaborate oil portrait of Sultan Selim III, Portrait of Selim III in His Chamber (AH1218/1803-1804). Heavily indebted to ancien régime ambassadorial portraits produced in eighteenth-century Istanbul, Kapıdağlı’s portrait creatively combines the techniques, compositional principles, and aesthetic values of European and Ottoman portraiture to produce a new cosmopolitan image of sultanic authority. The terms for Kapıdağlı’s innovative experiments with sultanic portraiture were dictated directly by the dynamics of a fluctuating Ottoman social landscape under the New Order. This chapter highlights the Islamic justifications for and debates surrounding Selim’s New Order reforms, which provoked Ottoman reformers and the clerical establishment (ulema) into stormy debates about the permissibility of adopting technologies from Europe (whether political, scientific, or artistic). As relations with France normalized after the French evacuated Egypt, Kapıdağlı’s portrait served to reinvigorate the legitimacy of Selim’s New Order reforms against mounting threats of popular unrest in the lead up to the May 1807 revolution. Selim tapped his official portraitist Kapıdağlı to capture this new ideal of Muslim rulership, which articulated Ottoman imperial superiority through explicit adaptation and recontextualization of European artistic elements.