Lot Essay
The very individual calligraphy that surmounts this miniature finds a comparable in that of a Timurid Shirazi miniature dated 1446 in the Keir Collection (B.W. Robinson, Persian and Pre-Mughal Indian Painting, Islamic Painting and the Arts of the Book, pl. 31, no. III.101, p. 140). It also bears strong resemblance to the perhaps more familiar copy of Sharaf al-Din 'Ali's history of Timur, the Zafar-nameh, completed for Ibrahim Sultan in Shiraz in Dhu'l Hijja AH 839/June-July 1436 AD (Eleanor Sims, Ibrahim-Sultan's Illustrated Zafar-Nameh of 839/1439, Islamic Art IV, 1991, p. 178). If anything the present miniature, with the extremely fine treatment of the swaying trees and the green vegetation that covers the hill, is more sensitively rendered than those.