PROBABLY OTTOMAN SYRIA, DATED AH 1205/1790-1 AD

This abundantly decorated room evokes the luxurious life which was lived within its walls. Probably built for the bayt of a wealthy Damascene merchant family, our set consists of six principal wall panels out of the larger original assemblage. Four of the panels have doors, which would have opened storage cupboards which would have been used to store soft furnishings: the value of some of these textiles, which probably would include a number of silks, is indicated by the fact that one of the doors has a lock. The remaining two, which have bars running horizontally across them, would probably have been shelves where the owner of the house could display porcelain, metalwork, or other luxury goods. Rooms like this today form the centrepieces of the Islamic Art galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (acc.no. 1970.170) and the Museum für Islamiche Kunst in Berlin (acc.no. I.2862), amongst others.

The paintings in the panels around the walls include depictions of bowls of fruit and vases of flowers, as well as landscapes. The latter begin to appear on Damascus rooms from around 1775, and some are known to have been large in scale and specifically intended to depict a particular city, normally Istanbul. On the present lot, they mostly are waterfront scenes, which may be interpreted as views of the Bosporus, and all are painted in dark red on an orange-pink ground. A very similar landscape is illustrated by Anke Scharrahs, Damascene ‘Ajami Rooms, London, 2013, p.147, fig.270.

To a modern viewer – Western or otherwise – walking into a Damascus room gives one the feeling of being transported across time and space to a world of the exotic. It is ironic that the rooms themselves also incorporated numerous elements which would have struck eighteenth-century Damascenes as foreign as well. Locally, they were known as ‘ajami rooms, a word often understood to mean something from Iran, but actually a generic term for anything from a non-Arabic speaking country. The profuse scrolling motifs above the doors and on the long panels between the sections speak the rococo aesthetic which had become popular in eighteenth century Istanbul, a taste that was paralleled by the mania for all things Turkish in Bourbon France (Anne-Christine Daskalakis Mathews, “A Room of ‘Splendor and Generosity’ from Ottoman Damascus” , Metropolitan Museum Journal, Vol.32 (1997), p. 128). Examples made between approximately 1830 and 1870 also include inset mirrors, a further acknowledgement of contemporary European taste.

The ‘Aleppo Room’ in Berlin is known to have been made for a Christian patron, a certain Isa ibn Butrus, and includes Christian subject matter in the panels such as the Virgin and Child. The room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, meanwhile, has verses eulogising the Prophet which seem to have been specially written for the patron. Daskalakis Mathews suggests that this may indicate that the owners of the room were Sayyids, who claimed descent from the Prophet and continue to enjoy a special social status in the Islamic world (Anne-Christine Daskalakis Mathews, op.cit., p. 133). The inscriptions on the panels on our room are taken from Qasida al-Burda, a thirteenth-century poem in praise of the Prophet. This suggests that the patron was a Muslim, and it is possible that they were also a sharif. There is a close stylistic similarity between the cartouches on the room in the Metropolitan Museum, which is known to have come from Damascus, and those on our room does suggest a Damascene rather than Aleppine origin for our room.

In addition to the examples in Berlin and New York, there are several other ‘Damascus rooms’ which were transported out of Syria around the turn of the twentieth century. The first recorded instance of this was in 1880 when the art dealer Vincent J. Robinson secured one for the Victoria and Albert Museum, though unfortunately this was largely destroyed when the museum was hit by a flying bomb in 1944 (Mariam Rosser Owen, ‘A Room from Damascus’, V&A blog (online), 2014). Other examples in institutional collections are in the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, the Shangri-La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design in Honolulu (acc.no. 64.26), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (acc.no. M.2014.33), the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the Aga Khan Museum (acc.no. AKM810), and the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. Many, of course, survive in situ in Damascus today, such as the Bayt Mujallad which is dated to AH 1204/1789-90 AD and has similar inscription cartouches to ours (Anke Scharrahs, op.cit., p.208, along with many other examples which remain in Damascus). Further examples have sold in these Rooms, 13 April 2010, lot 265 and 5 October 2010, lot 332.