From the 1850s, Iranian painters began to be trained along European lines at art schools, and many produced strikingly realistic official portraits based on photographs. Isma’il Jalayir taught at the main art school in Tehran, but he stands apart from his contemporaries. He developed a distinctive personal style, and he often depicted people excluded from direct political power, such as the Sufi saint Nur ‘Ali Shah, and this group of women from the harem of a member of the ruling dynasty. It may be that his aristocratic background allowed him greater freedom as an artist.

The emotionless, posed quality of the faces suggests that the women did not sit for him as a group but were photographed individually, and Isma’il then used the images to create a large composition. The women have gathered for a tea party in a pavilion in a wooded garden. The princess standing at the centre offers a glass goblet to another princess, also standing, while the veiled woman seated between them smokes a water pipe. The other women drink tea from a samovar and listen to the music of the tar – the instrument played by the woman on the right. Isma’il’s paintings are suffused with a dreamlike, melancholy air, which has transformed the tea party into an event filled with mystery.