NORTH EAST IRAN, 10TH CENTURY

The vivid design on this bowl does justice to the excavation reports of Charles Wilkinson, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, during his excavations of Nishapur - this ‘new and extraordinary’ type of pottery is ‘vigorously drawn’ with a ‘bright and gay’ colour scheme (quoted by Oliver Watson, Ceramics of Iran, London, 2020, p.124). The absence of any of the figures and animals which often appear on ceramics of this type draws attention instead to this example’s extraordinary colours - a combination of a lead stannate yellow pigment with a copper-based green, with broad black outlines in a pigment containing enough manganese to lend it a slight purple tint (Charles Wilkinson, Nishapur: Pottery of the Early Islamic Period, New York, 1974, p.4).

‘Inanimate’ designs such as this are often arranged into four parts by intersecting bands, such an example has been published as part of the al-Sabah Collection (Oliver Watson, Ceramics from Islamic Lands, London, 2004, p.251, Cat. H.6). On the present lot, however, these bands have been replaced by four lines of pseudo-kufic, somewhat resembling the word baraka – ‘blessing’. Together with the spotted background, it more closely resembles two unusual examples sold by Sotheby’s London, one as part of a Princely Collection, 5 October 2010, lot 65 and the other 3 October 2012, lot 146.