Mehmed The Hunter

Sultan Mehmed IV, remembered as Mehmed the Hunter owing to his passion for hunting, departed for Edirne, in 1657 on a hunting expedition. The large entourage that accompanied him was a display of imperial majesty that has been preserved for history as a visual document in the form of a series of oil paintings commissioned by Claes Rålamb, then the Swedish Ambassador to Istanbul.

This almost cinematographic record consisting of a total of twenty paintings is preserved at the Nordiska Museet, Sweden. Sixteen of the paintings returned to Istanbul nearly three hundred and fifty years after this event, as the guests of the Pera Museum.