Images of the Ottoman Empire

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire was one of the world’s great powers. Generations of travelers—explorers, traders, tourists, scientists, artists—were drawn to these magical lands. Whether depictions of contemporary life in the bustling street, the court, the harem, or elegiac evocations of the ruins of antiquity, the hundred images selected here by artists from David Roberts and Edward Lear to John Frederick Lewis bring a largely vanished world vividly to life.