- Design
- Enlarge image
Design
- Place of origin:
Isfahan (made)
Iran - Date:
1877 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Unknown
- Materials and Techniques:
Recorded in original registers as oil paintings on thick calico
- Museum number:
648-1878
- Gallery location:
In Storage
This colourful painting was traced from decorative tilework on a building in Isfahan, in 1877. A series of 39 designs was commissioned on behalf of the V&A (then the South Kensington Museum), in order to record this astonishing aspect of the sacred architecture of Safavid Iran, rendered in full scale and in colour. Robert Murdoch Smith and Ernst Hoeltzer, both of whom worked for the Anglo-Persian Telegraph Department, hired a team of Isfahani contractors to produce the paintings, which required "light scaffolding and other mechanical appliances" to reach difficult areas. The designs are painted onto sized paper fixed onto plain canvas, and show the tiled surfaces of walls, window-panels, arches, rib-vaults and even domes, copied from six different religious monuments. The decorative repertoire features a characteristic range of flowers, foliate scrollwork, ogival medallions and lobed cartouches, usually set against a blue background. Although the project was discussed as the documentation of historic Safavid architectural design from the early 17th century, one of the surveyed monuments was very much contemporary: the Masjid-e Sayyid which was built for a powerful landowning family of clerics, known as the Agayan-e Masjid-e Shah.
