Gold dish enamelled with flowers and the lion-and-sun motif, signed by Muhammad Jafar, Iran (Tehran), dated AH 1233 / AD 1817-18.

Circular plate with polychrome enamel flowers and birds around the rim. The centre of the plate is decorated with bunches of flowers between arches of tracery surrounded by a border medallions of flowers on a green ground. The central boss shows the sun (represented with the face of a woman) rising behind a crouching lion.

Previously part of the collection of the Indian Museum (number IS09406).

B.W. Robinson wrote of how he found the dish: '... in the course of unpacking and sorting all the Victoria and Albert Museum objects that had spent the war years in the cool and secure profundity of the Bradford-on-Avon quarries, I came across a rather large and heavy circular parcel wrapped in faded brown paper and tied with a dusty string. I unwrapped it and, to my great astonishment and delight, found that I had uncovered the enameled gold dish presented by the Fath 'Ali Shah to the East India Company -- over six pounds of solid gold, with beautiful painted enamel embellishments signed by Muhammad Ja'far and dated to 1818. When "John Company" was abolished after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the dish had been transferred, along with the rest of the Company treasures to the Indian Section of what was then the South Kensington Museum, and not being Indian, it was left to hibernate there for nearly a century in its original wrappings.'
B.W. Robinson, "Qajar Paintings. A Personal Reminiscence", in Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925, ed. Layla S. Diba, with Maryam Ekhtiar, Brooklyn, 1998, p.12.

Signed by the artist and dated AH 1233

This dish was a gift from Fath Ali Shah to the British East India Company and was made by Muhammad Ja'far in 1233 AH/1817-1818 AD. The Shah had chosen the auspicious astrological symbol of the Sun in Leo, seen in the centre of the dish, as the official emblem of Iran. It matched the official emblems of the Western powers with whom he tried to establish equal standing.

Fath Ali Shah was the second ruler of the Qajar dynasty, which reunited the country in the 1790s. He commissioned art on a grand scale during his reign from 1797 to 1834. Iran had been isolated for a long period. As a result, the works he commissioned mix richness with a certain naïveté.

M.97-1949