Guide
The National Palaces Painting Museum is housed in the Crown Prince's Apartments of Dolmabahçe Palace, and the building is itself part of the story it tells: built under Sultan Abdülmecid, it was the architectural sign that princes no longer lived shut away, as they had before the Tanzimat. Abdülaziz, Murad V, Abdülhamid II, Mehmed V Reşad, Yusuf İzzettin Efendi, Mehmed VI and Caliph Abdülmecid all used it while they were heirs.
Part of the building opened as the Painting Museum on 22 March 2014, after restoration. What makes it singular, in the Directorate's account, is its subject: it is the one museum that shows what the late Ottoman court actually liked in painting, and how the first Western-style picture collection in Türkiye was formed and grew. Between March 2014 and March 2020 it showed 200 works drawn from the National Palaces and Topkapı Palace collections; when the second part of the apartments was restored, the whole museum was rearranged, its display panels, lighting and labelling rebuilt to current practice.
It now shows 553 works, dating from the 16th century to the 20th, the collection having grown when Yıldız and Topkapı palaces came under National Palaces. The single most striking piece is Felix-Auguste Clement's painting from the Said Halim Pasha waterside mansion, Prince Halim's Gazelle Hunt in the Gatah Desert: The Greyhound's Share, the largest Orientalist canvas in Türkiye.
The rehang raised the number of thematic rooms from 11 to 34, which is the practical thing to know: this is a museum to walk slowly. The rooms are organised partly by painter — Ivan Aivazovsky, Salvatore Valeri, Emilio Della Sudda, Osman Nuri Pasha, Süleyman Seyyid, Halil Pasha, Şeker Ahmed Ali Pasha, Osman Hamdi Bey, Hoca Ali Rıza, Hüseyin Zekai Pasha, and two given to Abdülmecid Efendi and his studio — and partly by subject, from the Ottoman navy, battles and victories, the conquest and Mehmed II, to Ottoman ladies, the Turkish bath, imagined İstanbul, landscape at the Ottoman court, palace-trained painters, the Ottoman bureaucracy, portraiture, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Çanakkale.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
Entry fee
- Resim Müzesi · Local
- 200 ₺
- Resim Müzesi · Foreign
- 600 ₺
- Resim Müzesi · Reduced
- 100 ₺
- Resim Müzesi Bahçe · Local
- 100 ₺
- Resim Müzesi Bahçe · Foreign
- 150 ₺
- Resim Müzesi Bahçe · Reduced
- 50 ₺
Visiting hours
- Visiting hours
- 09:00:00 - 17:00:00
