Bottle
1650-1675 (made), 1800-1875 (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 and black; brass, engraved |
Brief description | Bottle, fritware, of flattened form, painted in underglaze blue and black with hunters shooting game amid dense foliage, Iran, 1650-1675; later metal mounts. |
Physical description | Bottle, painted in reserve against blue with black outlining, depicting a hunter aiming a gun at wild animals, in a leafy landscape. Similar designs are used on three other bottles in the collection (1125-1876, 2500-1876, 610-1889). The decorated brass neck is a later replacement, added in Qajar Iran, ca.1800-1875. |
Dimensions |
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Style | |
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 and Albert Museum 1501-1738. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. ISBN 0-9538196-1-2 |
Collection | |
Accession number | 2499-1876 |
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Record created | June 18, 2009 |
Record URL |
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