Lot Essay
Four other tiles from this series were offered in these Rooms 25 April 1995, lot 245. The inscriptions on those tiles showed them originally to have been made for the interior of an important tomb. In the note to that lot we speculated a link between those tiles and a mihrab tile, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. no. 469-1888, Pope, A.U.: Masterpieces of Persian Art, New York, 1945, pl.81, and Watson, O.: Persian Lustre Ware, London, 1985, pl.111, pp.134 and 191). The identical date on the present tile and on the mihrab shows this suggestion to have been correct. It has been proposed that the larger mihrab tile was part of the contemporary revetments made for the shrine at Najaf (1260s), the Imamzada Ja'far at Damghan (1266-7), or the Imamzada Ja'far at Qum (1266).