QAJAR IRAN, EARLY 19TH CENTURY

This charming double portrait offers a glimpse into the world of Qajar women. The two women in our portrait conform absolutely to the Qajar ideals of beauty with their joined eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes, puckered lips and elaborate hair styles. Depictions of women in Qajar painting are rare, when one sees them they are often entertainers at the court – dancers, musicians and acrobats – or scantily clad harem girls.

In her description of a painting of a ‘Female Dancer with Castanets’ in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Layla Diba mentions that many Qajar canvases showing women were usually conceived as part of a series to decorate a palace wall (Layla S. Diba (ed.), Royal Persian Paintings. The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925, exhibition catalogue, 1999, p.209, no.59). She also comments, with reference to a pair of paintings of female acrobats, that paintings of women were also rarely signed or dated, as is the case with ours.

A painting of precisely the same subject as ours is in the National Museum of Georgia, the subject described there as ‘Twins’ (I. Koshoridze (ed.), Oriental Collections of Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, 2014). It is slightly earlier than our painting, catalogued as late 18^th or early 19^th century, and likely provided the model for ours. A third version of this subject was sold in Hôtel Drouot, 14 April 1981, lot 130. The women in each painting hold different accoutrements – where ours hold a bottle and glass, in the Georgian painting the ladies hold flowers. Perhaps most intriguingly, the Paris painting depicts one of the women with a bejewelled sword tucked into her belt of the type usually reserved only for men of the court.