[An album of twenty-eight watercolours depicting Qajar tradespeople.]

IRAN. ; UNIDENTIFIED ARTIST.  (1842-43].)

£20000.00 

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Watercolours of provincial Qajar Iran, with two rare paintings of Afro-Iranians

28 watercolours, each trimmed to 110 by 160mm, mounted on card with ink manuscript borders, and interleaved with tissue. Small 4to (285 by 190mm). Contemporary dark blue morocco-backed velvet boards, gilt endpapers; sensitively recased, boards a little rubbed (with one small section of loss to the velvet) and discoloured along extremities, otherwise very good. Housed in a modern dark blue morocco-backed solander box. N.p., n.d., but likely [Erzurum and vicinity, 

A rare album of tradespeople, showing middle and working class Iranians rarely depicted in Qajar School paintings. It importantly includes two images of Afro-Iranians, whose existence was seldom recorded in Qajar visual culture until the use of photography became widespread toward the end of the nineteenth century. Though we cannot say for certain, it was potentially acquired by Jane (née Carruthers) Redhouse (d.1887), wife of James Redhouse (1811-1892), during their residence at Ezurum in eastern Turkey between 1842 and 1847 as part of the Anglo-Russian committee mediating border disputes between the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran.

 

The watercolours primarily depict men engaged in trade, carrying their tools and wares, or busily engaged in physical work. There are sellers of sherbet, poultry, herbs, cabbages, amulets, prayer beads, wine and water. A book-dealer even makes an appearance, casually transporting multiple tomes with the use of a leather book sling. Their range of dress is carefully depicted, from the fine green robes of the aforementioned book-dealer to the cabbage-seller’s holed and patchy attire. Such details are quietly significant, as they add socio-economic context to the images, showing which trades made good livings and which provided a more hardscrabble existence. The other subjects include beggars and three paintings of Iranian women, all in full-length walking dress, ranging from sober black to bright floral print.

 

The aforementioned watercolours of Afro-Iranians, a man and a woman, are the ninth and twenty-fifth pictures in the album. The man carries the ubiquitous Qajar qalyan, or water-pipe, while the woman carries a large metal dish upon her head. Afro-Iranians are all but invisible from the early (pre1850) Qajar visual record and scholars have only recently begun to trace their appearance in later visual sources, but many of these efforts have understandably focused on the rich resource of Qajar court photography and the population of African eunuchs associated with the Qajar harem. Here we see a significant glimpse of Afro-Iranian life beyond the court.

 

Interestingly, another painting of an Afro-Iranian (captioned ‘A Eunuch’, BM 2006,0134,0.14) is among the only comparable watercolours we have traced in institutional collections — a group of twenty-eight in the British Museum (2006,0314,0.01-28), which were found loosely inserted in an album from Charles Townley’s collection, clearly misfiled, with contemporary manuscript captions in English. Fourteen of these drawings depict near-identical figures to our own but are slightly less finely finished. 

 

The museum holds three albums depicting Qajar dress with which these loose drawings might be associated but only one is a plausible candidate. This is the album of nineteen drawings (1921, 0614,0.1) which was bequeathed by Darea Curzon, Baroness Zouche. The Zouche album contains drawings of Qajar court costume acquired by Robert Curzon (1810-1873) during his time at Erzurum in 1842-3, bound in a fine contemporary green morocco binding by Clarke & Bedford of London, dated 1842 on the spine. Most importantly, the Zouche album contains a two-page letter in French from one Moukhine, interpreter to the Russian delegation at Erzurum, discussing eighteen of the drawings and their prices, and apologising that he has not been unable to supply all of the desired drawings, as “Madame Redhouse” had acquired a group of them already. The Curzons, Redhouses, and Moukhine are all listed as resident at Erzurum in 1843 by Joseph Wolff in his 1845 Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara. Our drawings are likely to be those purchased by Jane Redhouse, with the loose set in the British Museum produced subsequently by the same artist for Robert Curzon, without duplicating exactly the Redhouse set. The Turkish binding of our album strongly supports this identification, as the Redhouses remained in Turkey after the conclusion of the British mission at Erzurum. 

 

This is an important album, offering a sympathetic insight into the lives of the Qajar middle and working class outside the major cities, likely acquired by a female British traveller. Its keen observation also marks it out as unusual amongst albums produced for Europeans in this period (most of which featured quickly-daubed stock figures for the tourist market) perhaps speaking to Jane Redhouse’s life, spent largely beyond the European milieu of transient expatriate life in the East.

Stock Code: 222088

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