The Crown Prince Residence stands on the Bosphorus waterfront as part of the Dolmabahçe Palace complex in the Beşiktaş district. For decades after the founding of the Turkish Republic, the building housed the Istanbul Art and Sculpture Museum, established in 1937 under the order of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and operated as part of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. A renovation running from 2010 to 2014 transformed the space entirely. When it reopened in 2014 as the National Palaces Painting Museum — Milli Saraylar Resim Müzesi in Turkish, funded by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey — its mission had shifted: to display the paintings that had once hung in Ottoman palace rooms, gathered back together from storage and dispersed collections into eleven exhibition halls.

One of the more unexpected stories the museum tells is of Ottoman taste. During the reign of Sultan Abdulaziz, two sections' worth of paintings were purchased directly from the Goupil Gallery in Paris — the same prestigious dealer who handled works by Millet, Bouguereau, and later Van Gogh. Abdulaziz was guided in these acquisitions by Şeker Ahmed Pasha, an artist and courtier with a keen eye for European academic painting. The canvases they brought back to Dolmabahçe represent the first time a Western-style collection was assembled at the palace: landscapes, portraits, allegorical scenes rendered in the style that dominated European salons of the 1860s and 1870s. What had once been the decoration of imperial apartments is now the museum's record of a dynasty looking outward.

The museum's collection of court paintings offers a different angle on the same story. Stanisław Chlebowski, a Polish painter, served as court artist to Sultan Abdulaziz and produced ambitious historical canvases. Fausto Zonaro, an Italian painter, held the same position under Sultan Abdülhamid II and is represented here by some of his most dramatic works — including his famous depiction of Mehmed II entering Constantinople in 1453 and a scene of Mehmed II at the siege itself. These are not documentary records; they are imperial myth-making in oil paint, commissioned to shape how the dynasty saw itself. Seeing them now in a museum hall rather than hanging in a throne room changes their register entirely.

The museum traces the arc of Ottoman and early Turkish painting in the Western tradition across several rooms. Works by Osman Hamdi Bey — the painter-archaeologist who was also founding director of Istanbul's archaeological museum — hang alongside pieces by Hüseyin Zekai Pasha and Hodja Ali Rıza. These artists represent what historians of Turkish art call the second, third, and fourth generations of Turkish painting in the Western mode: a long process of adoption, adaptation, and eventual transformation that began in the mid-19th century. One entire hall is devoted to Ivan Aivazovsky, the Russian marine painter who visited Constantinople several times and left canvases that capture the Bosphorus with an outsider's awe. The Ceremony Hall that holds his work — stucco-lined walls, composite-headed pilasters — remains the most architecturally striking room in the museum.