An Album of Persian Paintings and Drawings
18th-19th century
Description
This album is bound in folding or accordion format, with 20 folios, or 40 pages, containing Persian sketches and paintings. The majority of the works are rendered in black or red pigment, but a few are in full color. For the most part each page bears a single work, framed with decorative borders, but on a few pages, up to four different items have been fitted together. There are a variety of inscriptions—sometimes on the work of art and sometimes on the page backing—that name Persian artists active from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century, e.g., Mirza Baba (fl. 1785-1830), Muḥammad ‘Alī (son of Muhammad Zaman), Muhammad Baqir, Muhammad Hadi, Muhammad Hasan Afshar, and Muhammad Zaman (signed Ya Sahib al-Zaman) (fl. 1650-94). The album is dominated by botanical studies, but the contents also include animals and human figures. One work of art is non-Persian: a late Mughal painting of a semi-nude woman holding a lotus and enclosed in a crescent.
Dimensions
30 x 20 cm (11 13/16 x 7 7/8 in.)
Provenance
Ezzat-Malek Soudavar, Geneva, Switzerland (by 2014), by descent; to her son Abolala Soudavar, Houston, Texas (2014), loan; to Harvard Art Museums, 2015. Note: Ezzat-Malek Soudavar (1913-2014) formed this collection over a period of sixty years. She purchased the works of art on the international art market.
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