SIGNED MUHAMMAD QASIM, SAFAVID MASHHAD OR ISFAHAN, FIRST HALF 17TH CENTURY

This painting is signed by the master artist Muhammad Qasim, a contemporary of Reza 'Abbasi, who was active during the reign of Shah 'Abbas I. Two of his paintings, one in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, the other in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, are illustrated in B.W. Robinson, Persian Drawings from the 14^th through to the 19^th Century, London, 1965, pp.90-91, pls.62 and 63. Two more are illustrated in Abolala Soudavar, Art of the Persian Courts, New York, 1992, p.293, pls.120-21. Both Robinson and Soudavar date the paintings to around the 1650s, but more recent research by Adel Adamova has convincingly repositioned his works to the early 17th century, presented in a paper given at a conference in Edinburgh, 1998. This paints Muhammad Qasim in a completely different light - innovative rather than derivative, and as a contemporary rather than a pupil of Reza and thus much more influential to the course that Persian painting took in the 17th century.

Although it has been suggested that Muhammad Qasim and his contemporaries Muhammad ‘Ali and Muhammad Yusuf were all active in Mashhad, it is likely that Muhammad Qasim found patrons in Isfahan as well. His portrait of ‘Shah ‘Abbas and a Pageboy’ in the Musée du Louvre (dated 1627) suggests that the artist was well-known at the Safavid court (MAO 494; Sheila Canby, Shah ‘Abbas. The Remaking of Iran, exhibition catalogue, London, 2009, pp.250-51, no.123).

Other examples of Muhammad Qasim’s work include paintings in the 1648 Shahnama completed for the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad and a painting in the British Library catalogued as circa 1650 (B.W. Robinson and Eleanor Sims, The Windsor Shahnama of 1648, London, 2007 and Sheila Canby, Persian Painting, London, 1993, no.67, p.105). Our painting shows a clear fashion for combining polychromy and drawing that was introduced by Muhammadi, continued by Reza, and found favour into the mid 17th century (Canby, op.cit., p.107). It is one of the defining stylistic characteristics associated with the artist as well as the distinctive whirling sky which one finds on a number of Qasim’s paintings, including one of the ‘Chastisement of a Pupil’ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That is dated AH 1014⁄1604-05 AD and is the artist's earliest dated work (Maryam D. Ekhtiar, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby and Navina Najat Haidar (eds.), Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2011, pp.226-27, no.153). In the catalogue note accompanying that painting Canby writes of ‘stippled ground, fleshy clumps of low vegetations, jutting rocks with striated and cross-hatched contours’ as additional recurrent features of Qasim’s work (Ekhtiar et al, op.cit., p.226). All of these are features that we find on the work under discussion here.

Whilst Muhammad Qasim was clearly an artist chosen to illustrate a number of lavish manuscript commissions, including not only the 1648 Shahnama, but also other folios which have appeared on the market in recent years (see for example those sold in these Rooms 6 October 2009, lot 119 and 23 April 2015, lot 63), he also produced a small number of fully-worked full-page paintings. A large scale portrait ascribed Muhammad Qasim, but of a woman holding a decanter and cup, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (IS.133:26/A-1964).

The subject of our painting, that of a Sufi dervish, is unique in Muhammad Qasim’s oeuvre. Our figure holds both hands extended. In one hand he carries an empty knotted handkerchief, a symbol of nothingness and the dervish’s renunciation of material goods and worldly ambitions in an effort to free the soul from distractions and allow a greater focus on the divine. In his other hand he holds an iris, a flower riddled with symbolism in Persian culture – not only with connotations of nobility but also of paradise, beauty and the divine. The structure of the iris, with its layered petals, was seen as representing the many layers of reality and truth – an idea that can be mirrored in the Sufi concept of the journey towards divine knowledge.

Only 12 paintings to date are known to be signed by Muhammad Qasim (Robinson and Sims, op.cit., p.205) and this, which convincingly bears his hand and all the hallmarks of his distinctive style, adds another to this small corpus.