Lot Essay
Inscription:
Around the inside wall, undeciphered
In the years before the Mongol invasion, the potters of Kashan developed the mature ‘Kashan style’. The thickness of the metal-oxide pigment which was painted onto the glaze was such that patterns could be incised into it. This allowed heavy areas of glaze to be lightened – as in the decorative band on the present lot – with small scrolls and spirals, and for inscriptions to be rendered in reserve, with the text in white against a lustre ground. Around sixty examples of vessels decorated in this style are dated, the earliest being AH 595/1199 AD and the majority dated to the first three decades of the seventh Islamic century.
Many other examples of ‘Kashan style’ lustre ware are also entirely aniconic, including two examples in the Khalili collection (Ernst J. Grube, “Iranian stone-paste pottery of the Saljuq period”, in Cobalt and Lustre: the First Centuries of Islamic Pottery, London, 1994, pp.243-4, cat.nos.277 and 280).
Around the inside wall, undeciphered
In the years before the Mongol invasion, the potters of Kashan developed the mature ‘Kashan style’. The thickness of the metal-oxide pigment which was painted onto the glaze was such that patterns could be incised into it. This allowed heavy areas of glaze to be lightened – as in the decorative band on the present lot – with small scrolls and spirals, and for inscriptions to be rendered in reserve, with the text in white against a lustre ground. Around sixty examples of vessels decorated in this style are dated, the earliest being AH 595/1199 AD and the majority dated to the first three decades of the seventh Islamic century.
Many other examples of ‘Kashan style’ lustre ware are also entirely aniconic, including two examples in the Khalili collection (Ernst J. Grube, “Iranian stone-paste pottery of the Saljuq period”, in Cobalt and Lustre: the First Centuries of Islamic Pottery, London, 1994, pp.243-4, cat.nos.277 and 280).