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Lot Essay
This painting is an interesting example of a mixture of Indian and Iranian styles converging in Central Asia. The rendering of the figures with their stylised oval faces with curled locks of hair hanging over their ears is very Safavid in feeling. The architecture though ostensibly Persian in form, in its decoration shows clear Indian influence in the cusped palmettes which line the top of the flat roofed buildings and the form of the star and cartouche band that forms the entableture. A painting signed by the artist Muhammad Nadir Samarkandi in the Chester Beatty Library (inv. MS.31), depicts a very comparable pair of figures in Persian style, (Linda York Leach, Mughal and other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995, colour plate 132, p. 940). The architecture in the background of the Beatty painting though very similar in terms of decoration to our painting is clearly more Indian in form with rounded domes and extended awnings. The nisba or title of the Beatty artist- samarkandi suggests he was Central Asian in origin even though Leach attributes the painting to Kashmir circa 1650. Leach does recognize that Muhammad Nadir Samarkandi was most probably trained in the Iranian world and later travelled to Kashmir.
Our present painting is also closely related to a Bukhara stlye painting from a Khamsa of Nizami dated AH 1058/1648-49 AD in the collection of the National Library of Russia (Saltykov-Shchedrin) in St. Petersburg, (inv.MS.PNS.66.f.147.b, illustrated in M. M. Ashrafi, Persian-Tajik Poetry in XIV- XVII Centuries Miniatures, Dushanbe, 1974, no. 88, p. 106). Both the St. Petersburg painting and our own painting show clear Indian influence in their style but both remain in terms of both their figurative and architectural depictions solidly grounded in a Persian artistic idiom. For an illustrated copy of the Khamsa of Nizami from Bukhara, dated AH 1064/1653-54 AD, of comparable style to our present painting which sold in these Rooms, see 25 April 1997, lot 64.
Our present painting is also closely related to a Bukhara stlye painting from a Khamsa of Nizami dated AH 1058/1648-49 AD in the collection of the National Library of Russia (Saltykov-Shchedrin) in St. Petersburg, (inv.MS.PNS.66.f.147.b, illustrated in M. M. Ashrafi, Persian-Tajik Poetry in XIV- XVII Centuries Miniatures, Dushanbe, 1974, no. 88, p. 106). Both the St. Petersburg painting and our own painting show clear Indian influence in their style but both remain in terms of both their figurative and architectural depictions solidly grounded in a Persian artistic idiom. For an illustrated copy of the Khamsa of Nizami from Bukhara, dated AH 1064/1653-54 AD, of comparable style to our present painting which sold in these Rooms, see 25 April 1997, lot 64.