Şevket Dağ, the first Ottoman-Turkish painter to engage comprehensively with the interior as a painting subject, was born in Istanbul in 1875 and graduated top of his class from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1897. Throughout his career he painted the mosques, tombs and palace buildings of his city; unlike many of his contemporaries, he never travelled abroad, dedicating his entire output to the structures of Istanbul. His work nonetheless attracted international recognition: in 1909 he participated in the Munich Glaspalast exhibition and was awarded a gold medal.
From the second half of the nineteenth century, Ottoman painters increasingly embraced the visual documentation of cultural heritage as an artistic responsibility. Following the tradition established by his teacher Osman Hamdi Bey, whose canvases took tomb doors, mihrabs and tiled interiors as their subject, Şevket Dağ painted religious buildings in their everyday use, as living spaces of worship and devotion. This canvas of 1909 depicts the entrance façade of the Tomb of Selim II, in the courtyard of Hagia Sophia. Designed by Mimar Sinan and completed in 1576–1577, the tomb is framed by Iznik tile panels that bear witness to the full maturity of the ceramic art of the later sixteenth century.
The composition presents the entrance door in a close, vertical frame, foregrounding the surface of the building rather than its scale. Tile panels decorated with naturalistic floral and rumi motifs in blue, turquoise and red on a white ground rise to the arch above, while the door leaves display the refinement of the kündekâri technique with its mother-of-pearl inlay. A foundation inscription runs across the register above the door. A faded cloth hanging covers the upper portion of the doorway; a pair of slippers and a walking stick left on the threshold speak to the building's continued life as a place of visitation and prayer. The artist signed the work in both Arabic script and the Latin alphabet, adding the word 'Constantinople'. That the painting dates from 1909 lends it an additional documentary significance: the left-hand portal panel of the tomb had been removed by the French dentist Albert Sorlin-Dorigny and sold to the Louvre only fourteen years earlier, and this canvas stands as a witness to an architectural heritage already irrevocably altered.
