Middle East, Ceramic, Tile; Tile, moulded fritware, depicting a falconer on horseback, Isfahan, Iran, 1860-1875

Tile, glazed fritware, moulded design painted in black outline with details in pink, yellow and turquoise, depicting a falconer on horseback, in a stylised floral landscape (including poppy flowers), reserved against dark blue ground.

This tile was bought as part of a much larger consignment of Iranian art objects for the South Kensington Museum (today the V&A) by Robert Murdoch Smith in Tehran, 1878. The vendor was Jules Richard, a French art-dealer based in Iran from 1844. Between 1875 and 1889, he was the South Kensington Museum's principal source of Iranian art objects, purchased via the Museum's agent Murdoch Smith, who also lived in Tehran. Richard specified that this horseman tile (together with five related tiles) had been brought to Tehran from Isfahan.

Many versions of this moulded tile were sold from the 1860s onwards, in both Iran and Europe. The mounted falconer is dressed in a seventeenth-century Safavid style, and the theme's great popularity confirms that the city's historic past was still celebrated in nineteenth-century Isfahan. Further examples are in the V&A collection (V&A 623-1868, 624-1868, 283-1874, 1502A-1876, 547-1878, 547A-1878). While these were usually bought singly, multiple sequences of the same tile were installed in the London home of the art connoisseur Ionides (1 Holland Park), and also in a late Safavid bathhouse in Isfahan. The art-dealer Ferdinand Méchin stated the design to be a seventeenth-century portrait of the Safavid Shah Abbas II (1642-66), but others were not convinced.

547A-1878