拍品專文
Both this large dish and the previous lot belong to a group of Kashan lustre ceramics which Oliver Watson describes as exhibiting ‘the miniature style’. Together with polychrome mina’i ware, they are believed to have taken inspiration from pre-Mongol manuscript illustration, almost all examples of which have now been lost. Some of the main features of this style which Watson identifies are the ‘detailed treatment’ given to clothes, a landscape ‘invariably’ populated by chequered trees encircled by a ‘halo’ of dots, and an overall arrangement of motifs in individual panels (Oliver Watson, Persian Lustre Ware, London, 1985, p.68).
The arrangement of motifs on this design – with a ring of seated figures encircling a mounted figure – reflects a spectacular dish in the Art Institute of Chicago which is dated Safar AH 587/March 1191 AD (acc.no. 1927.414). It is likely to also be of similar period to a dish in the Khalili collection, with three figures in the centre, the faces of which bear a close resemblance to those on our dish (Ernst J. Grube, “Iranian stone-paste pottery of the Saljuq period”, in Cobalt and Lustre: the First Centuries of Islamic Pottery, London, 1994, pp.234, cat.no. 264).