Sami Yetik is counted among the last representatives of the generation known in Turkish painting as the 'Soldier Painters'. He received his first art lessons from Osman Nuri Paşa at the Kuleli Military Secondary School, and later became a student of Hoca Ali Rıza at the Military Academy. Having entered the Academy of Fine Arts in 1900, he graduated with first-class honours in 1906, before travelling to Paris in 1910 to work in Jean-Paul Laurens's studio at the Académie Julian, returning to Istanbul in 1912. During the First World War, he worked at the Şişli Studio, established in 1917 for the production of war paintings; it was in that same year that he completed this work, titled ‘The Sea’.
The painting shows a wooden jetty extending from the shore into open water, and a yellow-painted timber structure raised on piles. From the second half of the nineteenth century, sea baths became a widespread feature of Istanbul's coastline: enclosed wooden structures built on piles driven into the seabed, fitted with timber screens and partitioned enclosures to allow bathers to enter the water in privacy. The structure in the painting answers precisely to this description.
Beneath leaden skies, a restless sea churns with white-capped waves; a deserted jetty and the yellow bath-house glowing against the grey-green water together conjure not an ordinary day but an abandoned place. The silhouette of a red-flagged vessel on the horizon to the right strikes a sharp contrast with the stillness of the shore: in Istanbul in 1917, every ship passing through the Strait carried the weight of war. Compared with Halil Paşa's ‘Sea Baths at Bostancı’of 1913 (200-0040-HP) in the Sakıp Sabancı Museum Painting Collection, it becomes clear how differently the two works frame the same architectural type: the lively summer rhythm of Halil Paşa's scene gives way, in Yetik's painting, to a brooding heaviness.
