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Lot Essay
Inscriptions:
Around the sides in large thuluth, Qur'an 2:255.
On the top, in the border, Qur'an 3:18-19 (in part) and 3:26-27 (in part).
On the top, in the rosette, an extract of the prayer on the Beautiful Names.
Large kufic around the shoulder, undeciphered.
Like the previous lot, this sunduq was modelled on an example in the Dar al-Athar al-Arabiyya dating from the reign of al-Nasir Muhammad (Islamic Art in Egypt, exhibition catalogue, Cairo, 1969, no. 9), with another similar example in the Museum fur Islamische Kunst in Berlin (B. Hessling Verlag, Islamische Kunst in Berlin, Berlin, 1971, p. 19). These Mamluk examples inspired nineteenth-century craftsmen, and one example in the Khalili collection contains a note written in 1907 saying that it was ‘the beautiful workmanship of Mr. Parviss of Cairo’ (S. Vernoit, Occidentalism, Oxford, 1997, p. 230). Giuseppe Parvis (d. 1909) was an Italian wood-carver whose workshop was commissioned by Khedive Isma’il to make objets d’art to display at world fairs like the Philadelphia Centennial exhibition in 1876. It was his firm which was given preferential access to the Museum of Arab Art from 1890. Another sunduq box from this workshop with identical inscriptions to the present lot can be seen in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.73.41). A similar sunduq, also attributable to Parvis, sold in these Rooms, 7 April 2011, lot 407.
Around the sides in large thuluth, Qur'an 2:255.
On the top, in the border, Qur'an 3:18-19 (in part) and 3:26-27 (in part).
On the top, in the rosette, an extract of the prayer on the Beautiful Names.
Large kufic around the shoulder, undeciphered.
Like the previous lot, this sunduq was modelled on an example in the Dar al-Athar al-Arabiyya dating from the reign of al-Nasir Muhammad (Islamic Art in Egypt, exhibition catalogue, Cairo, 1969, no. 9), with another similar example in the Museum fur Islamische Kunst in Berlin (B. Hessling Verlag, Islamische Kunst in Berlin, Berlin, 1971, p. 19). These Mamluk examples inspired nineteenth-century craftsmen, and one example in the Khalili collection contains a note written in 1907 saying that it was ‘the beautiful workmanship of Mr. Parviss of Cairo’ (S. Vernoit, Occidentalism, Oxford, 1997, p. 230). Giuseppe Parvis (d. 1909) was an Italian wood-carver whose workshop was commissioned by Khedive Isma’il to make objets d’art to display at world fairs like the Philadelphia Centennial exhibition in 1876. It was his firm which was given preferential access to the Museum of Arab Art from 1890. Another sunduq box from this workshop with identical inscriptions to the present lot can be seen in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.73.41). A similar sunduq, also attributable to Parvis, sold in these Rooms, 7 April 2011, lot 407.