Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

By

Mihri Rassim was one of the most intriguing Turkish artists of her day — but she was known more for her eccentric lifestyle than for her art.

She shunned her royal upbringing by running away from home to pursue an arts education, and to secure the freedoms that the Ottoman Empire didn’t provide to women in the early 1900s.

She was a pioneer, opening the first art college for women in Turkey, and encouraged artists for decades. And she was a cunning marketer who sometimes bent the truth about her artwork as a way to support herself when the going got rough.

“She was an avant-garde artist whose most avant-garde work was her own life,” said the art historian Ozlem Gulin Dagoglu , who is writing a monograph on her.