IRAN, 10TH CENTURY

One of the most enigmatic groups of Islamic pottery, 10th century Nishapur ware is easily identified by the use of vivid, often figural, designs and the use of a lead stannate pigment which appears as a bright mustard yellow. Their iconography has been variously interpreted as astrological symbols, royal Sassanian imagery, or depictions of the annual celebration of Nowruz. While Nishapur ware more often depicts rams and ibexes, the rabbit is not uncommon across the broader corpus of medieval Islamic pottery and was frequently depicted in contemporaneous Khalila wa Dimna manuscripts. Red-slip bowls with a similar silhouette but with non-figural decoration can be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait (Oliver Watson, Ceramics from the Islamic Lands, London, 2004, p. 229).