Hoca Ali Rıza, 1864-1930

The artist known as Hoca Ali Rıza started out as an army cadet at the Kuleli Military High School. His education continued at the Military Academy, where he received instruction in art from Nuri Paşa and later from Süleyman Seyyid. His artistic talents revealed themselves early on and in 1881 he was awarded the Mecidiye order by Sultan Abdülhamid II for his artistic success while still a student. One of the most important representatives of the “Military Painters” group in Ottoman times, he is called “Hoca Ali Rıza” because of his long years of service as a teacher (hoca).

Although he is known to have produced portraits and scenes of everyday life, nearly all of his oils are landscapes. Hoca Ali Rıza was one of the first Ottoman artists to base his pictures on sketches that he did outdoors. Although his landscape painting showing the mouth of the Göksu Stream on the Asian side of the Bosphorus was done in 1911, its treatment was nostalgic even by the standards of the day. According to Hoca Ali Rıza, it was an artist’s duty to set down and preserve for posterity things that were at risk of being lost or destroyed.