Images of the Ottoman Empire

The V&A's collection of images of the vast, sprawling Ottoman empire is unrivalled. Generations of European travellers - explorers, traders and tourists, naval and military personnel, scientists, artists, even political cartoonists - were drawn to these lands, and left records of what they saw there. Their paintings, drawings and prints show a now largely vanished world. Whether bustling depictions of contemporary life in the street, the court and 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 the Ottoman empire vividly to life.