At this time of the year, Istanbul turns into a mosaic of colour. Sprouting from their bulbs in full bloom, tulips spill across parks, mosque courtyards, and along the Bosphorus promenades, dancing in shades of red, violet, saffron, and white. 

But tulips are more than ornamental. Historically, they were political symbols, luxury goods, and emblems of identity. In the early 18th century, they came to define a distinctive period known as the Lale Devri (1718–1730), or Tulip Era. 

And though tulips were the flower of the moment in the golden age of Ottoman culture, it was a French painter, Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, who captured the world around them. His brush recorded the people, pageantry, and power plays that gave the Tulip Era its glow.

Born in 1671 in Valenciennes in northern France, Vanmour would be drawn eastward, arriving aged 18 to Istanbul as part of a diplomatic entourage. His official role was court painter for French Ambassador Charles de Ferriol, sent by King Louis XIV’s to the Sublime Porte. But the assignment bloomed into something larger: a lifelong visual record of a world few Europeans had seen with such intimacy.

His works capture both the spectacle of diplomacy and the subtleties of everyday life: dervishes, merchants, palace eunuchs, street vendors, and, of course, the elaborately attired sultans. His art documents the vibrancy of a city at the nexus of empires, and a society negotiating its identity between East and West.

Vanmour embedded himself in local life, this was not a distant Orient imagined from a Parisian studio. It was Istanbul, observed up close, making him a witness to the crescendo and then the Tulip Era.

Eveline Sint Nicolaas, Dutch author and authority on Vanmour wrote in her 2003 book An Eyewitness of the Tulip Era: “Vanmour and his paintings have not only served as visual documents for Turkish customs and costumes in the Tulip Era (1718-1730), but also played an important role in the formation of a new artistic milieu in the Ottoman Empire”.

This overarching span of art positions Vanmour differently than his predecessors, European artists like Pieter Coecke van Aelst, brothers Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and Albrecht Durer, who were all interested in Ottoman culture between the 1480s to 1550s. 

Their repertoire, too, was centred around royal life, court matters, historical scenes and certainly portraits. 

But as the historian Philip Mansel wrote in his review: “Few painters have left such a complete record of Istanbul—or indeed of any other city—as Jean-Baptiste Vanmour.”

Vanmour’s work was not a distant Orient imagined from a Parisian studio. It was Istanbul, observed up close.

Tulip Era: Beauty as diplomacy

Vanmour’s most prolific period coincided with the Lale Devri, a time of peace, artistic experimentation, and courtly elegance under Sultan Ahmed III.

The tulip became a symbol of the age, not just in gardens, but in poetry, architecture, and textiles. It stood for refinement, leisure, and the empire’s cosmopolitan confidence.

Vanmour’s paintings reflected the same ethos. Though he didn’t paint tulips as botanical subjects, his work lives inside the world they adorned. His attention to costume, posture, and ceremony mirrored the cultural values that tulips embodied: elegance, harmony, and a kind of controlled flamboyance.

Where Dutch painters like Jan Brueghel the Elder gave us still-life tulips during Tulipomania, Vanmour gave us a living society in bloom.

His success as an artist was inseparable from his diplomatic surroundings. His patrons, French, then Dutch, secured him access to the Divan, to royal audiences, and to scenes typically closed to outsiders.

His most famous works were published in Paris in 1714–15 as the Recueil Ferriol, an album of 100 engravings depicting the people of the Ottoman Empire. From Armenian priests to Janissaries, from Greek merchants to African servants, the album offered a wide-ranging, meticulously observed cross-section of imperial life.

Ironically, Vanmour’s name didn’t appear on the title page. But his images shaped Europe’s understanding of the East for generations to come. He wasn’t just painting for posterity—he was shaping perception.

His reputation only grew with time; subsequent commissions from ambassadors such as the Dutch envoy Cornelis Calkoen allowed him entry into even the most rarefied corners of Ottoman power.

By 1725, Vanmour was granted the title Peintre ordinaire du Roy en Levant by Louis XV—an official designation for a man who had, by then, become more than a painter. He was, in effect, a documentarian of the empire and a visual historian of one of its most ornate chapters.

Today, tulips still bloom each spring in Sultanahmet Square, where festival displays echo the grandeur of the past. They remind us of a moment when flowers were political, beauty was diplomatic, and art was a tool of soft power.

Jean-Baptiste Vanmour may not have painted tulips directly. But his world was full of them, in gardens, on robes, in poetry, and in the layered self-image of an empire in bloom.

Were he alive today, he might be part documentarian, part influencer, a visual ethnographer of an age. Instead, his legacy endures in archives, museums, and digital montages, offering us a vivid window into one of history’s most artistically articulate chapters.