An oil painting depicting writer Halide Edib Adıvar, one of the modern pillars of contemporary Turkish literature and particularly the Turkish novel, made by Czech painter Alphonse Mucha in Prague at the end of the 1920s has been found.
The literary giant was the author of the first war novel published in Turkish literature.
The piece was discovered through John Mucha, the grandson of the famous painter living in London and the president of the Mucha Foundation.
Turkey's Ambassador to Prague, Egemen Bağış, said in a statement that Halide Edib Adıvar visited Prague with her husband in 1925 and that they became friends with the well-known Czech painter of the time, Alphonse Mucha, during their stay there.
Alphonse Mucha was a Bohemian and Czech painter living in Paris during the art nouveau period, best known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters.
Bağış stated that Mucha had a photograph of Halide Edib, and then he made an oil painting by looking at that photo. Bağış and his team had been trying to trace the whereabouts of the painting since the day they started working in Prague.
Noting that they finally found the painting thanks to their research over the span of two years, extended due to the restrictions related to COVID-19, Bağış stated that they came across the important work in the collection of the Mucha Foundation in Prague.
