The painting depicts an elderly man in traditional Ottoman religious costume: a long red garment with embroidered hem, belted at the waist, and a Turkish turban.

[2][3] The first version of Hamdi's painting was exhibited at the Grand Palais in the 1906 Paris Salon, under the title L'homme aux Tortues ("Man with tortoises").

[6] Both may be inspired by an article that Hamdi read in the Le Tour du Monde travel journal decades before, which described Korean tortoise trainers in Japan, who trained their animals to walk in lines to the beat of a drum.

The Ottoman Empire, which still encompassed parts of the Balkan peninsula, parts of North Africa, all of Anatolia and the Levant, and much of the Arabian peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, was under serious threat from both the growing power of nationalist movements within its territory, and from the incursions of foreign powers which would eventually divide the Empire between them in the aftermath of the First World War.

[8] Although not widely shown or understood at the time, the painting achieved greater significance in subsequent decades as it presaged the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 which brought an end to the direct autocratic rule by the Sultan (eventually replaced by the regime of the Three Pashas after the 1913 coup d'état) and set the stage for the Empire's entry into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers and for its subsequent partitioning.