Bottle
about 1650 (made), 1800-75 (mounting)
| Artist/Maker | |
| Place of origin |
In 19th century Qajar Iran, before a contemporary export market had emerged, a commercial market for historical artefacts arose, fuelled by Western collectors and museums. Historically, fragmentary material culture, particularly ceramics, including 17th century Safavid fritware, and Chinese porcelain, which had been damaged through use, was often repaired or re-purposed with metal mounts, frequently brass, to replace missing spouts, handles, lids and necks. Many examples were acquired for the Victoria and Albert Museum by Major-General Sir Robert Murdoch Smith (1835-1900) in Iran in the 1870s and 1880s. Among these is a large corpus embellished with a minutely engraved repertoire of figures from 19th century Iranian visual culture: youthful Qajar princes, veiled women, dervishes, acrobats, as well as monstrous supernatural beings, known as divs, and a range of bizarre humanoid creatures. These mounted vessels of Safavid fritware are therefore couched in a Qajar environment and re-fitted according to contemporary taste.
Object details
| Category | |
| Object type | |
| Materials and techniques | Fritware, underglaze painted in blue; brass, engraved |
| Brief description | Bottle, fritware, painted in underglaze blue and black, Iran, about 1650; later brass mounts. |
| Physical description | Bottle of fritware, with bulbous body and elongated neck, mounted with chased brass to hide the broken neck. Painted in underglaze blue and black, respectively from the neck down to the shoulder with bands of plantain leaves, reserved-painted panels, arabesques and ruyi heads. On the body are two cavorting deer, one landing bird and two more in flightanimate the scene which includes Kraak clouds, small birds, weeping willows, large baulstrades and branches. A band of ribboned panelsl with plain dividers, runs round the bottom between two plain bands. The style of the flowers and weeping willows strike an odd note on a conventional imitation Kraak setting. Imitation Chinese square mark in blue. |
| Dimensions |
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| Style | |
| Production | Register |
| Subjects depicted | |
| Summary | In 19th century Qajar Iran, before a contemporary export market had emerged, a commercial market for historical artefacts arose, fuelled by Western collectors and museums. Historically, fragmentary material culture, particularly ceramics, including 17th century Safavid fritware, and Chinese porcelain, which had been damaged through use, was often repaired or re-purposed with metal mounts, frequently brass, to replace missing spouts, handles, lids and necks. Many examples were acquired for the Victoria and Albert Museum by Major-General Sir Robert Murdoch Smith (1835-1900) in Iran in the 1870s and 1880s. Among these is a large corpus embellished with a minutely engraved repertoire of figures from 19th century Iranian visual culture: youthful Qajar princes, veiled women, dervishes, acrobats, as well as monstrous supernatural beings, known as divs, and a range of bizarre humanoid creatures. These mounted vessels of Safavid fritware are therefore couched in a Qajar environment and re-fitted according to contemporary taste. |
| Bibliographic reference | Crowe, Yolande. Persia and China: Safavid blue and white ceramics in the Victoria & Albert Museum 1501-1738. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002, Cat. 85, p. 88. |
| Collection | |
| Accession number | 1091-1876 |
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| Record created | March 16, 2009 |
| Record URL |
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