‘An Oriental Collector’: Calouste Gulbenkian’s Taste for Arts of the Islamic World and China

Born in 1869 in Istanbul, the crossroads of Eurasia, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian always defined himself as an ‘oriental collector’. His cultural view was expansive, extending beyond the Ottoman Empire of which he was a citizen to the east and west. By the time of his death in Lisbon in 1955, at age 86, this vision was reflected in a splendid art collection comprising some 6,000 objects originating from England to Japan, and dating from antiquity to the early 20th century. Today, they are housed in the Lisbon museum that bears his name (Fig. 1). A long and lucrative career in the petroleum industry provided the financial means to invest in art, as his fortune paralleled the seismic shift that occurred with the transformation of oil as a source of kerosene, used for lighting, to a source of gasoline. Gulbenkian’s formidable negotiation of a multinational consortium to exploit the petroleum-rich region of Iraq between 1911 and 1914 earned him a lucrative share, and when the price of oil tripled, he became the world’s richest man. His life, business, and collecting occurred against a dramatically changing geopolitical landscape that witnessed the end of the Ottoman Empire, colonialism, and two world wars.

Calouste Gulbenkian was born into an Armenian Orthodox Christian family (Fig. 2). His father traced his origins to the ancient town of Talas in Kayseri province (formerly the Silk Road city of Caesarea), while his mother’s family is said to have had Persian ancestry. Calouste’s own life journey took him decisively westwards. At the age of 14 he was sent to Europe for three years to study at the École de commerce in Marseille and King’s College in London. In 1892 he opened an office in London, and from 1896/7 onwards lived permanently outside Ottoman lands: first in Britain, and then after 1918 in France, shifting to Portugal in 1942. Even though he was instrumental in the creation of the Turkish Petroleum Company, he never returned to Istanbul or visited oil-rich Mosul or Iraq. In 1919 he was appointed financial adviser to the Persian Embassy in London, but he did not travel to Iran either. And although he did tour Egypt, Palestine, and Syria on an excursion in 1934, he made no significant acquisitions on this trip.

Thus, the bulk of his ‘oriental’ collection was formed in Britain and France. The portion described as coming from the ‘Islamic East’ comprises around 750 items (about 1,200 individual objects), mainly ceramics and tiles from the 12th to 19th centuries as well as enamelled glass, carpets, textiles, and manuscripts and bindings. His art from the ‘Far East’, by contrast, is less plentiful (about 400 objects) and more focused in time and space, namely, Ming and Qing porcelains (with one important exception) and Chinese hardstones that closely relate with his Islamic purchases as we shall see, as well as Japanese lacquer, inros, and prints.

Fig. 1 Exterior of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Fig. 2 Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869-1955)
Photo © Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon

Gulbenkian’s Ottoman cultural background instilled confidence in his choice of arts from the Islamic world and China, and, in contrast with the European side of his collection, he very rarely relied on the expertise of dealers, scholars, or auctioneers in making his choices. His selection was influenced by what was available on the market and brought to his attention, with only purchases of Islamic arts of the book showing signs of direct intervention by others.

This brief essay sketches the major historical trends in the evolution of Calouste Gulbenkian’s collection. It is organized chronologically, emphasizing moments that intersected with changing economic and political circumstances to highlight Gulbenkian’s personal connections, learning, and taste. This summary reflects in-depth research conducted for the exhibition ‘The Rise of Islamic Art, 1969–1939’, held in 2019 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Calouste Gulbenkian’s birth. New research on his Chinese collection offers a more nuanced picture, revealing for the first time that while his acquisitions of Chinese ceramics mirrored trends in his Islamic pottery purchases, the impetus to buy one of his most famous Islamic objects, a jade jug (Fig. 3), came from Chinese art, demonstrating a constant interest on his part to explore and identify connections between regions and objects.

The first time Gulbenkian described himself as a collector was in the chapter on oriental carpets in his book on the early petroleum industry, La Transcaucasie et la péninsule d’Apchéron: Souvenirs de voyage (Transcaucasia and the Apcheron Peninsula: Travel Memories), published in 1891. His writing reveals a keen historical interest in these objects, especially those of the Caucasus where Armenian merchants were active, and he would acquire two important 19th century publications. But this initial enthusiasm is not evident in his art inventory, and curiously, only fifteen carpets are registered before 1920. Acquiring carpets for commercial ends, however, was a personal endeavour from at least 1894, until the 1920s, when he developed a serious interest in classical historical carpets, acquiring over fifty by 1939.

Gulbenkian’s main interest in his twenties and thirties was in collecting ceramics, something which followed contemporary European interests and which would turn into a lifelong pursuit. A close correlation can be found between his collecting, exhibitions he might have seen, and publications in his library, indicating a keen interest in learning and training his eye. The earliest book to refer to oriental art in Gulbenkian’s library is A Descriptive Catalogue of the Maiolica, Hispano-Moresco, Persian, Damascus, and Rhodian Wares, in the South Kensington Museum by Charles Drury Fortnum (1820–99), which he may have purchased as a student at King’s. Coincidentally, his first recorded purchases in London coincide with the subject of this book: five ‘Rhodian’ (lznik) plates from the auction of the collection of the famous French Orientalist Charles Schefer (1820–98).

Another important reference for Gulbenkian was The Godman Collection of Oriental and Spanish Pottery and Glass, 1865–1900 by Frederic Du Cane Godman (1834–1919), ornithologist, collector, and trustee of the British Museum. Godman’s main objective was to ‘make an artistic and historical series illustrating that branch of the Ceramic Art which comprises the work of the Moslem potter’ (Godman, 1901, p. v) within the context of 19th century interest in the value of oriental art as a source of inspiration to spur innovation in the stagnant European arts.

Fig. 3 Tankard
Made for Ulugh Beg (1394-1449)
Uzbekistan, Samarqand; Timurid period, c. 1447-49
White jade (nephrite); height 14.5 cm, width (base) 16 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (328)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Fig 4. Mosque lamp
Made for Amir Ali inb Baktamur (d. 1329)
Egypt or Syria; Mamluk period, 14th century, c. 1321-29
Enamelled and gilded glass; height 31 cm, diameter (max) 20.5 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (1033)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

This cause was also championed by the British artist Henry Wallis (1830–1916), whose works Gulbenkian also owned. Wallis’s writings legitimized collecting oriental ceramics in the west for their role as precursors and sources of inspiration: ‘Wisdom, it was said, came from the East; it might have been added that with her, and from the same region, also came the understanding of all that was most excellent and refined in [ceramic] art’ (Wallis, 1893, p. 5). Gulbenkian followed these ideas with enthusiasm, strikingly juxtaposing Middle Eastern ceramics and glass with Italian majolica in purpose-built display cases in his Parisian home, and even organizing a large vitrine of Iznik pottery to occupy the wall beneath a polychrome-glazed rondel of Faith by Andrea di Marco della Robbia (1435–1525).

Gulbenkian was also interested in the artistic innovation Godman and Wallis promoted. A fine example of this is a 14th century mosque lamp (Fig. 4) purchased from the collection of Baron Gustave de Rothschild (1829–1911), which had previously inspired the French glass artist Philippe-Joseph Brocard (1831–96) to reconstruct its medieval enamel-painting technique to create a revivalist copy for display at the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Gulbenkian was aware of this connection, and alongside his purchases of very fine Mamluk enamelled glass, he acquired works by French artists such as Brocard, Émile Gallé (1846–1904), and Alphonse Giboin (1828–1921).

Calouste Gulbenkian’s initial enthusiasm for Iznik ware (Fig. 5), which would result in one of the finest collections in the world, was followed swiftly by large numbers of Seljuk and Ilkhanid ceramics brought from Iran mainly by Armenian dealers. Their shared ethnicity and communal contacts meant that Gulbenkian was kept up to date with the latest finds. Many of these wares came from excavations at Rayy and elsewhere in Iran. Among the finest of these early acquisitions is a small lustre plate with a blue gazelle in the centre, which Gulbenkian immediately loaned for display at the ‘Exhibition of the Faience of Persia and the Nearer East’ in London in 1907 (Fig. 6). It was published under his name, publicly affirming him as a collector of ceramics and bringing prestige to his collection.

Already in this object it is possible to see Gulbenkian’s fully developed taste for eye-catching, stand-alone objects that are intact, unblemished, and brilliant in colouring. Colour was a fundamental criterion, and he rarely bought more monochromatic objects such as Islamic metalwork, inlaid wood, or ivory.

Colour was what also attracted him to Chinese ceramics, and he made his very first purchase of porcelain at the same time. Interestingly, it was a vivid polychrome dish, also with a horned animal in the centre, but this time of a mythological qilin (hooved chimerical creature) (Fig. 7). Two more Chinese plates, with an elephant and a bixie (winged mythical beast), closely followed, and he would continue to acquire many objects with these animals as well as the dragon and the phoenix in both Islamic and Chinese ceramics, hardstones, woven silks, tiles, knotted-pile carpets, and manuscript paintings.

Fig. 5 Plate
Turkey; Ottoman period, c. 1545
Stonepaste with underglaze painting; height 31 cm, diameter 35.5 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (818)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Fig. 6 Dish with gazelle
Iran, Kashan; Ilkhanid period, late 13th-early 14th century, c. 1321-29
Stonepaste with underglaze painting; height 31 cm, diameter 22 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (882)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Fig. 7 Plate with qilin
China; Qing dynasty, Kangxi period (1662-1722), early 18th century
Porcelain with famille verte enamels; diameter 36 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (1033)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

By the 1920s, the relationship between Chinese and Islamic pottery had become so highly developed in his collecting that Gulbenkian reinforced the comparison in one of his displays, provocatively placing two blue-and-white Iznik plates to the left of a group of Chinese porcelains in the same colour scheme.

In March 1914, Calouste Gulbenkian finally succeeded in brokering a series deals in collaboration with the Turkish Petroleum Company to exploit Iraqi oil, from which he gained a share and his famous epithet ‘Mr Five Percent’. A few months later, on 28 July, war broke out. The destruction caused by the Great War in Europe and ensuing collapse of the Ottoman Empire had a considerable impact on the way Gulbenkian went about his collecting of Islamic and Chinese art. His focus shifted from acquiring objects mainly from Armenian dealers to pursuing items from European collections and auction houses. The evidence for this is dramatic: from 1898 to 1913, Gulbenkian purchased fewer than twenty objects with a European pedigree; during the short war years until 1919, he acquired three times as many. These acquisitions came mainly from established European collections, from connoisseurs in France such as Michel Manzi (1849–1919), Jules Jeuniette (1850–1925), and Claude Anet (1868–1931), to others such as Arthur Sambon, Henry J. Pfungst, Louis Huth, Max Lyon, and Walter Beaupré Townley.

Some of these sales reflect the natural cycle of generations and the liquidation of estates, often with descendants trading in their parents’ oriental art for something more modern, but the large number of sales over such a short period also points to the effects of wartime hardship. At the Arthur Sambon Sale in 1914, Gulbenkian picked up his first, highly prized Iznik basin, in blue-and-white (Fig. 8), snapping up a large Chinese porcelain dish to match the following year at Thomas Agnew & Sons in London, also with radiating, decorated petals on the interior—both pieces at reduced prices.

A decline in supply was no doubt responsible too for Gulbenkian’s shift towards objects with a European pedigree. Already in the late 19th century there were growing signs of the disappearance of historical art objects from Ottoman markets, due in part to excessive western interest on the one hand, and increasing legal protection of patrimony on the other. By the early 1880s, nearly all the glass lamps from Cairene mosques had been taken by collectors (or protectors). Thirty years later at the 1910 Munich exhibition ‘Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art’, Hugo von Tschudi (1851–1911) noted that the finest Islamic art was no longer to be found in Oriental bazaars; instead, attention should be paid to the treasuries (Schatzkammern) of European churches and to princely collections, which were formed over many centuries through east–west trade and gifts.

Fig. 8 Footed basin
Turkey, Iznik; Ottoman period, c. 1510
Stonepaste with underglaze painting; height 22 cm, diameter 42 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (821)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Fig. 9 Plate with a pair of peonies
China; Ming dynasty (1368-1911), early 15th century
Porcelain with underglaze cobalt-blue decoration; diameter 40.3 cm, height 7 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2374)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Gulbenkian’s collecting follows this trajectory and over the coming years he would increasingly acquire Ottoman and Safavid textiles and carpets from European ecclesiastic settings and aristocratic houses. His Armenian contacts profited from this trend, often bringing these objects to his attention or even seeking them out at Gulbenkian’s instruction, travelling to Italy and Central Europe and setting up new networks there.

The Great War was not only the first ‘world’ war it was also the first ‘oil’ war. Petroleum supply became critical and in 1919/20 the price of oil tripled. Gulbenkian attained enormous wealth and began purchasing all types of art at high prices and in volume, across the entire range of his collection. In just four years, from 1919 until 1924, he purchased nearly 200 Islamic objects. This development was accompanied by a shift away from ceramics to carpets and the art of the book, including about fifty manuscripts, folios, and bindings, more than twice the number of purchases recorded previously.

This new enthusiasm coincided with increasing scholarly interest in the field of painting in Europe and the acquisition of important literature for his library. It also parallels rising interest in the same art form by his close colleague and friend, the American mining engineer Alfred Chester Beatty (1875–1968). Beatty acquired his first illuminated Qur’ans in Cairo in 1914, and his collection of manuscripts expanded rapidly during the 1920s. He invited Gulbenkian to look at books over dinner, the two exchanged manuscripts by post, and he advised him on his bindings.

A mixture of friendship and business was probably also behind the integration of the famous Anthology made for Iskandar Sultan (1384–1415) into the collection (Fig. 10). Sometime around 1923, Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) ‘presented’ Gulbenkian with his finest manuscript—it was an exceptional object to have been merely a token of friendship, and was most likely given for advice that led to positive earnings on Rothschild’s oil portfolio.

As for the rest of Gulbenkian’s collecting at this time, it is best described as the pursuit of exceptional single objects. Among them are a rare ceramic mosque lamp and tile mihrab, as well as the magnificent jade jug made for the Timurid sultan Ulugh Beg (r. 1447–49) (Fig. 3). Probably made in Samarqand, this object travelled from there to the Mughal Court, where it was inscribed with the names of Shah Jahangir (r. 1569–1627) and his son, Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), turning it into a symbol of Mughal dynastic succession from the great Timurids of Central Asia. After its acquisition, it was not placed with Islamic objects but within a display of his substantial collection of Chinese hardstones, opposite the finest object: a white jade lioness with a cub.

Gulbenkian also began acquiring important carpets for relatively high prices, beginning with his favourite, a blue-ground Kirman, in 1921, followed by very large Safavid and Mughal carpets for use as sumptuous floor coverings in his newly purchased Parisian home.

On 31 July 1928 Gulbenkian successfully completed the negotiation of the Red Line Agreement with the Iraq Petroleum Company to create a highly influential oil cartel that would operate over a vast territory, from Bulgaria to Yemen. This event coincides with another peak in artistic consumption and the realization of much sought-after acquisitions.

Fig 10. Anthology of Iskandar Sultan (1384-1415)
Copied by Mahmud ibn Murtaza al-Husayni and Hasan al-Hafiz
Iran, Shiraz; Timurid period, dated 813 AH/1411 CE
Opaque watercolour, ink, and gold on paper; 27.4 x 17.2 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (LA161)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Fig 11. Medallion carpet with ‘animal combat’ scenes
Iran, Kashan (?); Safavid period, mid-16th century
Silk-knotted pile, silk warp and weft; 230 x 180 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (T100)
Photo © Carlos Azevedo

After four years of negotiation, Gulbenkian finally obtained a very fine Mughal pashmina fragment, brought by a Parsi merchant from India to London, and the following year, after two years of attempts, he signed the contract for an enormous silk hunting carpet belonging to Count Branicki of Warsaw. The latter episode did not have the ending he would have wished, however, as in the following days the transaction was legally blocked by the Polish state. After considerable discussion in the press, he was obliged to abandon the sale.

Gulbenkian then set his sights on a replacement carpet, but it would take seven years to secure it. Once again it came out of a historic European collection, this time from Italy, into the possession of Wilhelm von Bode, who gifted it to the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Berlin (Fig. 11). Gulbenkian knew the carpet from the 1910 Munich exhibition and a recently published book on antique rugs by Wilhelm von Bode and Ernst Kühnel. He actively pursued it using German dealer Hans Stiebel, who was living in Paris at the same time, as the intermediary. The American academic and dealer Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) later described it as ‘undoubtedly by the same designer as the Branicki carpet’, which no doubt would have pleased Gulbenkian. Knotted entirely of silk, the carpet’s central medallion is surrounded by ‘animal combat’ scenes between real or imaginary animals, including the Chinese bixie and qilin; a theme which can be traced back to ancient representations of a lion (leo) attacking a bull (taurus) as a symbol of the night sky at the spring equinox.

As the European economy weakened throughout the 1920s, Gulbenkian’s competitors were more frequently wealthy Americans, often also involved in the petroleum industry. Persian carpets were major objects of prestige, signalling their owner’s wealth and connections with the Middle East, and increasingly became objects of competition. Between 1924 and 1928 the prices of rare carpets ‘practically doubled’, and there was a craze for silk carpets and large ‘Isfahans’ with vines and blossoms on a red ground. Dealers who could bridge the Atlantic were well positioned to take advantage and a pattern of concurrent American interest developed, including between Gulbenkian and the Rockefellers.

Even at the end of the decade, oil continued to shape the market. In August 1939, just a month before war broke out again, the ‘Coronation’ carpet lent by Joseph Duveen to the crowning of Edward VII (r. 1901–10) came up for sale. Gulbenkian had the carpet inspected and developed an elaborate scheme to disguise his interest but was outbid. The carpet went for the large sum of £6,000 to the Oklahoma oil millionaire Jean Paul Getty (1892–1976). By this time, Gulbenkian’s house was well laid with spectacular carpets (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12 Salon of Calouste Gulbenkian’s home on Avenue d’Iéna, Paris
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
Photo © KEURHADJIAN

Nine months later, in May 1940, the Germans invaded France and Gulbenkian and his wife moved to Vichy with the Iranian Legation. The Gestapo made ‘exhaustive enquiries’ about him and sought to access the contents of his home in Paris. The Anglo–Soviet invasion of Iran in August 1941, intended to secure Iranian oil fields from the Germans, led to a break in diplomatic relations between Iran and France, and Gulbenkian was obliged to leave, travelling to Lisbon in March 1942. Seven years later he made his final acquisition: the famous ‘lion’ bottle, previously in the collection of Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague, Countess of Béarn (1869–1939) (Fig. 13).

Once again, this object reinforces Gulbenkian’s keen interest in connections. Made of transparent enamelled glass in either Egypt or Syria in the 14th century, its decoration showing yellow qilins chasing balls of colourful ribbons comes from Chinese kesi silks brought to the region by the Mongols. Gulbenkian knew the image well, as five years earlier he had bought a pair of Qing (1644–1911) bottles with a similar pair playing. The glass bottle, and a beaker bought in 1940, are unique among the corpus of Islamic glass and are believed to have been made by the Mamluks for the Chinese market. Gulbenkian’s Chinese collecting continued for another seven years with the purchase of two exceptional objects: a Yuan dynasty cup (Fig. 14) and a Ming blue-and-white plate (Fig. 9). The latter, precursor to the great Iznik wares in the same colour scheme he had acquired years earlier, made a fitting object for a final touch on his fifty years of oriental collecting.

Fig. 13 Bottle with Chinese lions
Egypt or Syria; Mamluk period, 14th century
Enamel and gilded glass; height 40.5 cm, diameter (max) 27cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2370)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Fig. 14 Cup with pedestal foot
China, Yuan Dynasty (1272–1368), 14th century
Porcelain with qingbai glaze; height 10 cm, rim diameter 9.5 cm
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2372)
Photo © Catarina Gomes Ferreira

Jessica Hallett is curator of the Early Modern Middle East at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon.

Selected bibliography

Jonathan Conlin, ‘Renowned and Unknown’: Calouste Gulbenkian as Collector of Paintings’, Journal of the History of Collections 30, no. 2 (2017): 317–37.

—, Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, London, 2019.

C. Drury E. Fortnum, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Maiolica, Hispano-Moresco, Persian, Damascus, and Rhodian Wares in the South Kensington Museum, London, 1873.

Frederic Du Cane Godman, The Godman Collection of Oriental and Spanish Pottery and Glass, 1865–1900, London, 1901.

Calouste S. Gulbenkian (Caroline Beamish, trans.), Transcaucasia and the Apcheron Peninsula: Travel Memories, Lisbon, 2011.

Jessica Hallett, ‘Calouste Gulbenkian and the Rise of Islamic Art’, pp. 13–34, and ‘The Gift of Ubiquity: Armenian Dealers and Their Networks’ (with Maida Chavak), pp. 55–66, The Rise of Islamic Art, 1869—1939, exh. cat., Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 2019.

David J. Roxburgh, ‘Au Bonheur des Amateurs: Collecting and Exhibiting Islamic Art, ca. 1880–1910’, Ars Orientalis 30, (2000): 113–30.

Henry Wallis, The Oriental Influence on the Ceramic Art of the Italian Renaissance, London, 1900.

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