The British in Persia

Behzad, who was born before 1450 and died after 1520, repre sents the zenith of the Mongol and the opening of the Safawid period in Persian painting. He was head of the Herat Academy until 1506, when Shah Ismail took him to Tabriz, made him his chief librarian, and covered him with honours. Only a few ex tant work. are indisputably by his hand. A characteristic early work is the History of Timur, illustrated in 1467, which was for merly in the Schulz collection and afterwards went to America ; an edition of Saadi's bustdn in the Cairo library is dated 1487; and the illustrations to Majniin and Leila at Leningrad are among his last works. Both in Herat and in Tabriz he had many pupils, who carried his style far and wide in Persia, Western Turkestan, and India ; and even in the 16th century his name was already so famous that his art was imitated on every side, while later on pages of the most various origins were furnished with his signature to enhance their value.

The Tabriz School.

The next generation of painters in Tabriz is dominated by the highly-gifted Sultan Mohammed, who exercised a commanding influence in the whole field of art at the court of Shah Tahmasp. In collaboration with other masters he illustrated editions de luxe of the Persian epics, several of which have come down to us; but for the most part he preferred genre subjects and portraits, which were produced as single sheets and were designed to be bound up in volumes with speci mens of the handwriting of famous calligraphers. He opened new fields of activity to the painters by bringing lacquer bindings into fashion, and also by inducing them to design patterns for stuffs and knotted carpets to be made at the royal factories. Some of the studies for the celebrated hunting and animal tapestries of the 56th century were made in his studio, as were also a few velvets and silk brocades with figure subjects of the delicacy of miniatures.

Since the end of the 55th century an immense impetus had been given to Koran decoration at Tabriz. It was here that the pictur esque division of the title-pages into star- or medallion-shaped fields and borders with a reciprocal pattern or a cartouche design was devised, and this, transferred to the knotting technique, brought about a revolution in the style of Persian carpet-making. The ornament grows richer and more complicated; to the ara besque are added slender floral twines in a bewildering profusion of lines, palmettes, rosettes and cloud patterns.

In Behzad's time Shah Mahmiid of Nishapur came to eminence as a master of the taliq script, while later Mir All of Herat, "the royal scribe" (d. 5559), held the foremost place. Sultan All el Katib and many other calligraphers and illuminators heard the call of the Ottoman rulers and founded a school of book-decoration at Constantinople, which adhered closely to the tradition of Tabriz.

The Isfahan School.--Late

in the 56th century, when all the artistic forces of Persia were once more being concentrated at the new capital, Isfahan, under the powerful impulse communicated by Shah Abbas the Great, there arose also in Isfahan a new and important centre for the art of book-production in all its various forms. Mir Imad el-Husni (d. 5658) and All Riza Abbasi com

peted in calligraphy for the royal favour, while others sought to attract attention by animal figures ingeniously constructed out of pious mottos and similar subjects, or by a perfect mastery of the shikeste, a complicated script so full of flourishes as to verge on illegibility. In painting there is a link with the schools of Herat and Tabriz in the person of Ustad Mohammedi, who was un doubtedly the first to put his observations of nature on to paper in the purest ink-wash technique without any reference to a text. His successor as head of the painters' gild at Isfahan was Riza Abbasi, whose signature, genuine or doubtful, is frequently met with; it is still not established beyond dispute whether this artist is identical with the calligrapher mentioned above, and with Aga Riza, who is thought to be of an older generation. Be that as it may, it was he who filled the albums of Persian and Indian collectors with his gay, sure-handed colour sketches and drawings in red chalk on the most every day subjects, and with carefully executed pages in rich colour; and he ultimately became so much admired as almost to overshadow, for a time, the fame of Behzad. He likewise gave a new impulse to the illustration of manuscripts, and his elegant, fashionable style gained him a great influence in the other decorative arts also ; painted tiles and lac quered doors in the garden-palaces of Isfahan clearly show the mark of his atelier.

Riza's best pupil, and his bosom friend, was Muin, one of whose extant works is a portrait of his master ; the style created by the latter was still a living force at the end of the 17th century, in the works of Mohammed Qasim, Mir Mohammed Ali, Mohammed Yusuf and numerous others.

Later Persian painting is of little interest to the history of art. In the 58th century European paintings and engravings were slavishly copied, and Nadir Shah's expeditions to India introduced transitory influences of the Mogul school. At the beginning of the 19th century an enormous impetus was given to lacquer painting, though only as an ordinary bazaar industry, which per meated the entire realm of writing materials and toilet accessories; decoration also took the form of large canvases, such wretched and barbarous productions as to demonstrate that Persian artistic taste, once so cultivated, had now become a thing of the past. Since the end of the 19th century the growing interest displayed by European and American museums and collectors in Persian miniatures has called into existence a considerable number of workshops for the production of fakes, where single pages and even complete manuscripts are concocted in the style of any old master that may be desired. This somewhat questionable devel opment has at least the advantage of preserving skilled craf tsman ship from decay and maintaining some contact with the master pieces of the past.