On Qajar painting

What follows is the abbreviated text of the article “On Qajar Painting”, by the same author, which appeared in Iran-nameh magazine, No. 3, year 17. The new section of the article begins under the heading “Notes on Qajar Painting”.

The history of Qajar painting goes back to the late Safavid and especially Zand era. During the reign of the Safavid king Shah ‘Abbas I (16th and 17th centuries), relations with European countries were greatly increased. Iran enjoyed an extended period of prosperity, fostered by a powerful central government and economic stability. Having suppressed the Uzbek enemy at the north-east, Shah ‘Abbas had also reached an armed peace of sorts with the Ottoman Turks at the western borders, creating a feeling of security in that direction…

The painting of the Qajar era, which begins in the 19th century and continues into the 20th, can be classified in two categories. From the beginning to the end of the rule of Nasser-ed-Din Shah; up to the 1890s. Here we have an outline of the painting of the first period, and the prominent painters of the time:

Classical Qajar painting is a royal art. This is perhaps the most significant point that comes to mind in the consideration of this art. A “market” for art did not exist in its current usage. Contrary to medieval Europe, clergy and clerical institutions did not support the artists, as Islam did not have a favorable view of the arts. Therefore the only “patrons” of the arts were the noblemen of the court, who supported the painters, poets, musicians, and other artists, and provided then with a livelihood. In return the artist worked only for them.

In such a situation the artist had very little contact with the ordinary citizens, though he himself had risen from among their ranks. It was these conditions which decided the subject matter of the paintings. When the patron of art is the court and the artist works only for royalty, he must depict subjects that are pleasing to the court. As a result most of these paintings are portraits of the king and noblemen. Another subject is scenes of festivity, canvases depicting dancing girls and musicians, which were the chief courtly amusements.

There are also certain points to be considered regarding the technique of these paintings. The paintings of this time were mostly done in oils. In traditional and classical Iranian painting (miniature) oil paints were not used. This medium was taken from European art, as the pigments used for small-scale paintings on paper were not suitable for large-sized murals on walls. The pigments were derived from natural ingredients and were not chemically manufactured. Through working with native arts and crafts, especially rug-weaving, knowledge of pigments was extensive among Iranian artists and artisans. The colors were mainly reds, especially cerise, and also ocher, black, verdigris and emerald green, as well as combinations; red, brown and jade green. The colors were basically chosen for their brilliance and intensity. One rarely sees any dusty maroons or dim grays.

Symmetry has long been present in the arts of Iran; in architecture, pottery and porcelain designs, particularly in carpets. In Qajar portraiture this principle is also present and strictly adhered to.

One of the innovations of this age which resulted through the encounter between European painting and Iranian visual arts was the implementation of the conventional rules of perspective, which were nonexistent in classic Iranian painting. Even disregarding this factor, the landscapes were imitations of European art, as the pigments used for small-scale paintings on paper were not suitable for large-sized murals on walls. The pigments were derived from natural ingredients and were not chemically manufactured. Through working with native arts and crafts, especially rug-weaving, knowledge of pigments was extensive among Iranian artists and artisans. The colors were mainly reds, especially cerise, and also ocher, black, verdigris and emerald green as well as combinations; red, brown and jade green. The colors were basically chosen for their brilliance and intensity. One rarely sees any dusty maroons or dim grays.

The second period of Qajar painting coincides with the rule of Nasser-ed-Din Shah and afterwards. Relations with Europe underwent great expansion in the second half of the 19th century. Colonial policies of western nations, especially Britain and Russia had far-reaching effects on Iran’s role in history. These factors, combined with internal turmoil, caused immense shifts in the social structure, which came to an explosive climax in the form of the Constitutional Revolution. The expansion of the publishing industry, the founding of the Dar-ol-Fonoon (schooling with modern methods), creation of a modern army, the publishing of newspapers, contact with western cultures and the translation of their literature and sciences, changes in Iranian poetry and prose, the invention of photography—which was able to document the daily life of common people more efficiently than painting—and its effects on painting, were all events which more or less happened during the long (50 year) reign of Nasser-ed-Din Shah…

At this point it is necessary to touch briefly upon two other developments in the painting of the Qajar era. One is the traditional and classic form of Iranian painting known as miniature, which has its own characteristics, and the other is a common school of painting named “improvisational”, better known as the “coffee-house” (qahveh-khaneh) school, whose artists generally came from the common classes. The famous painter of the decline of the Qajar era was the distinguished Kamal-ol-Molk… The Shah gave him the title of Kamal-ol-Molk in 1310 AH. Four years later he decided to perfect his painting through the study of the great European masters, and departed for Europe. His work can perhaps be divided into two groups, before and after his departure for Europe. Before his journey, he was greatly influenced by the classic Qajar painting and that of previous eras…

With the death of Kamal-ol-Molk in 1319 AH this school of painting came to an end.

Notes on Qajar Painting

1. Banning the reconstruction of reality in plastic arts (painting and sculpture) means handing over nature to metaphysics and reality to hyperreality, creating an insurmountable gap between man and nature and turning the world into a play on irrelevancies, or in the opposite sense, idealizing reality, seeing the world as paradise and taking refuge from the earth to heaven, which in itself is a manner of escaping reality, rejecting it and binding one’s heart to its opposite.

Because of the ban on depicting faces, the painter was unable to turn directly to religious subjects, the issue of life or divine, spiritual stories of saints and prophets. Unlike Christian, Buddhist or Indian artists, he was unable to immediately illustrate his sublime, religious and mythical feelings and perceptions, or in other words, manifest passion, delight, agony, expectation of death, wish for redemption or any other feeling towards God and existence. Faced with such a tremendous restriction, Iranian miniature painting tries to idealize this world, in all its objects and actions, which allow him to display his art, to transcend that which is, to promote the existing reality, lifting it to a truth he is nurturing in his soul and imagination.

2. This painting is as representative of the restricted, closed world of its time—a world of ignorance and spiritual poverty—as 19th century literature and history. Qa’em Maqam’s Compositions was regarded as the best example of Farsi prose, which meant a return to 600 years earlier. The typical example of official recording history is the Nasekh-ot-Tavarikh, which goes back even further in the past. In most of the paintings of this period, individuals have silent, expressionless looks, and the lifeless, frozen bearing of stuffed gazelles or sheep. Even in their costumes there is no undulation of drapery that could show movement. The artist intends them as mere pictures of individuals, not thinking of imitating the Creator; such imitation does not even cross his mind. There is no artistic creation; there is only the action of the hand of a craftsman. The painting of Fath-‘Ali Shah, drawn by “the humblest servant, Gholam Mehr-‘Ali in 1230 AH”, is a typical example of this lifeless stagnation: almond-shaped eyes, joined eyebrows, a blank look, an ample beard and an expressionless face; everything is a cliché complying with an awkward, inappropriate convention.

3. Perception of movement is seldom seen in conventional Qajar painting. Most of the individuals depicted are respectable, austere, unsmiling and more or less stern. The faces are motionless and expressionless, just as the eyes are void of feeling. In the picture of the Golestan Garden by Mahmood-Khan Saba Kashani, the Malek-osh-Sho‘ara (Poet of the Court), the branches and leaves of the trees undulating in the breeze induce a perception of time through movement. So is the case with many paintings by Sani‘-ol-Molk, Mirza-Abol-Hassan-Khan Sani‘ as well as lithographs, including the pictures of the Amir Bahador Shahnameh: They are full of movement, and show that the artist could transcend the closed social framework. Once again one sees that despite the bond between the artist and society, establishing a direct, immediate relation between social situation and a work of art can be misleading. Many works of these two artists do not conform to the conventions of their times. One example is the Fath-‘Ali Shah portrait by Mirza-Baba (1213 AH) belonging to the Oriental and Indian Office Collection. The Shah is sitting on a chair, with a lofty, indifferent look and an imperial glory. His arms and waist are bedecked with jewels. Like other pictures of the same Shah, the painting is full of sharp and lively colors, but unlike most of them, it is not a mere assembly of paints on the canvas, a “decoration” solely meant to please the eye; it is a work of art, with perspective and depth, and the viewer is dealing with a soulful and “animated” being.

4. The concept of time in the painting of this period (just as in religion, philosophy and literature) is a unified, integrated whole, not a continuous, divisible line. Time is divine, eternal and sacred, and its totality is ever present in the memory, and any change in it is an intervention from without, from above. In popular painting, for instance in pardeh-dari (the art of religious narration through paintings on canvas), the past and the future exist in the present. Consecutive events are depicted in several rows next to each other. The present includes the past and the future, and the future is a reverse image of the past. The setting is also a divine place. In pardeh-dari, Karbala—both the event and the site—is the center of past and present times (history); a divine and sublime truth, which means it is alive at all times—including the present—each generation living it in its own time and period. (Note the motto of Shi‘ite believers: “Every day is ‘Ashura and every land is Karbala.”)

In the medieval painting of Europe too, linked, simultaneous scenes of the life and martyrdom of Jesus Christ are the center of creation and resurrection and the truth of the history of the world. The Father (God) is born in the flesh of the Son (Christ), who redeems man’s original sin by accepting pain and death on the crucifix. Thus the salvation of the children of Adam and the resurrection (eternal life, eternity) becomes possible, in the death of the Son, the end (eternity) joins the beginning (genesis, creation); this death is the divine moment that contains the past and the future, all the times, and centralizes in itself the cycle of life and death and the rotation of the firmament. With the death of the Son, the horizon time, the time that comes out of the rotation of celestial bodies, the moon, the sun and the stars, the time that rules our flesh and soul, is ended in a symbolic way.

5. In the stillness of some of the official (classic) Qajar paintings, time is momentarily isolated, it is without a past or a future, but since that moment has distanced itself from its pictorial tradition (miniature) and has unknowingly turned to a new (European) way of depiction, it has no past, and is ignorant of the future; therefore, it is a suspended facade which cannot stand on the permanent foundation of art; like a phenomenon of time, it appears and is imprisoned in a facade. Quite contrary to that divine moment in Khayyam, with a deep existential consciousness of the past and future—two nothingnesses—and a moment of existence; a moment that contains all the nostalgia and envy of the two boundaries of time, two infinities, and lives with its soul the existing moment full of thought and feeling of all the non-existed and non-existing times…

Since the end of the world is nothingness;

Suppose you are nothing, and be merry since you exist.

However, measuring the frigid “time” of Qajar painting with Khayyam’s transient moment is a disproportionate analogy which may be useful to draw attention to the difference between two cultural phenomena.

6. Because it does not know time and place (not to know = lack of consciousness), which appears in the sometimes fossil-like rigidity of the characters, Qajar painting has a limited view of the reality of things and their relations. Not that it is not realistic; rather, it escapes reality and transforms it. (Like knowledge and insight, like the consciousness of that epoch, of which Nasser-ed-Din Shah’s travelogue is a good example, or like politics of the times, the world that Fath-‘Ali Shah knew—or Nasser-ed-Din Shah, and the memoirs of E‘temad-os-Saltaneh—as well as other knowledge, and the perceptions of the innovative poet Qa’ani—a contemporary of Victor Hugo—from poetry and literature.)

7. Technical and professional inability of that realism in the way of depicting arms and legs, the hem of the cloaks or the straight, uncreased skirts of the women, or for instance in the vague, strange look of the lover and the beloved. Like the miniature, the picture is depicted with obvious, explicit lines; there is no sign of chiaroscuro. The symbols of nature (still life) are mostly flowers, fruits (apples, pears…) and birds (parrots and nightingales).

8. In the Qajar period, as of course in any other period, the “individual”—either the elite or ordinary people—does exist. There are also princes, courtiers, statesmen and politicians whose portraits are depicted by the powerful hands of masterful portrait painters—such as Sani‘-ol-Molk and a couple of others. The individual does exist, but “individuality” does not. The people are subjects, and not citizens who have rights. They are absent from the “cultural/artistic” world just as they are disregarded in the “socio-political” life. Therefore, there are portraits of the superiors, but not the subordinates.

In Western painting, paying attention to ordinary people and the scenes of their life is a consequence of a historical/social development. Such attention is seen in Iran in the second half of Nasser-ed-Din Shah’s reign, but not out of an intrinsic social development as in the case of Europe, but mostly owing to the introduction of photography in Iran, and an artistic “imitation” by that time’s painters of its potentials. It is from this period that the fortuneteller, the doctor, the dervish and the peddler appear on the canvas.

9. Like the shah, the court, the orderers and the supporters, Qajar painting is simple and primitive, with the same tribal glory and luxury. However, since it is longing for the Sassanian glory and has fantasies of being an empire (Fath-‘Ali Shah), it appears naive, sometimes with rural flamboyance.

Fath-‘Ali Shah’s megalomania, his imitation of the figures of Persepolis and Taq-e Bostan on the rock-face bas-reliefs of Cheshmeh ‘Ali in Shahr-e Ray, his lion hunting scenes in which an entourage of crowned princes accompany His Imperial Majesty, his sending of full-size, bejeweled portraits to other countries and his comparing himself to Napoleon and the Tzar on the one hand, and his bitter, humiliating defeat in two wars, with its ensuing desperation and surrender on the other… and that arrogance of idle princes, miserable statesmen, contemptible aristocrats, and that daily poverty and ignorance and misery… and the multitude of Ulema sashaying in between… Reflections of such a chaos and turmoil can seldom be found in the paintings of this period. Unlike the miniature which ascended and transcended its boundaries, this art of “the great ones” neither breaks out of its closed framework, nor turns to the society in which it is brought up, unless exceptionally. So, Qajar painting is at best representative of a tiny part of reality. Although fragments of the conditions of those times can be found in paintings, but it seldom deals with the reality itself, and even less with the truth. In the period of Fath-‘Ali Shah in particular, by imitating the engravings of the Achaemenians’ Persepolis (Apadana staircase) or the Sassanian’s Naqsh-e Rostam and Taq-e Bostan, the full-size portraits of the illustrious king try in vain to be symbols and means for the promotion of royal power and imperial glory, or, like miniatures in the Shahnameh or Nezami’s Khamseh, to project an image of the glory, sublime culture, taste and luxury of the court.

10. The book dedicated by Fath-‘Ali Shah to the British court is both a clear example of the megalomania of the “Sultan of Supreme Glory” and the role that such gifts were supposed to play: Divan-e Khaqan, a painting by Mirza-Baba depicting Aqa-Mohammad-Khan and Fath-‘Ali Shah, Tehran, 1802 AD, dedicated to the then British Crown Prince (later King George IV) in 1812 AD. The poems at the top and the bottom of the pictures are expressive of the political awareness of the composer and sender (the Shah himself), and his image of himself. On either side of Aqa-Mohammad-Khan’s portrait, these lines are read:

If there is one sword that guarantees conquest;

It is the sword of the King of the World;

The one whose humblest servants;

Are the commanders and the competent ones.

That lion-hearted one, whose lion;

Is guarded by the Shah of Shirvan;

Heir to Jamshid, Mohammad Shah;

Whose army is as large as the world.

And now, the description of the unique picture of the “poet” himself:

The rule of that all-powerful emperor;

Commands destiny and fate.

His servants, Khosrow and Sanjar;

Are each the king of their time.

Before his humblest companion, a hundred Khans;

Are equivalent to smoke in the course of the war.

The pillar of his palace and the height of his glory;

Are on top of the seventh heaven

(Quoted from Fath-‘Ali Shah’s book of poems, which was apparently displayed for the first time in London in July 1999.)

11. Like its poetry and music, Qajar painting has a coded language, and its symbols assume their meaning according to the said rules and conventions, perhaps somewhat like Iranian music, in which the pieces are played within certain frameworks.

The motifs of Farsi poetry—lover, beloved, wine server, flower, cup, wine, etc.—appear abundantly in painting too. On the other hand, in the pictures of Shahs and the great ones or the court ceremonies, the inviolable order, the rigid structure and the common rhetoric of composers of odes can be seen. In drawing the face, the full moon, arched, joined eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes and rosy cheeks are always present, and the same symmetrical structure of the poem prevails, not only in the composition of the garden and flower and foliage and aristocratic mansions (Royal Persian Painting, pp. 214 & 215), but even in the hair of the dancers and the patterns and colors of the dresses of men and women. Qajar painting materializes each image or motif within the accepted system and tradition.

12. The flaws of Qajar painting—in comparison to 19th century European painting—notwithstanding, one cannot say that it is not a painting school with a style of its own, and therefore has an originality which both attaches value to it and distinguishes it from other examples of the art.

13. Where is the aesthetics of this style of painting placed? In an eye-deceiving glory and majesty. In giving form to the ideal beauty, which usually appears in the image of women, still life or gardens. Unlike unanimous and “cliché” portraits, most of the paintings are full of cheerful and lively colors of red, crimson, purple, brown, orange, amber and the like. In his coloring too, the artist is not seeking to imitate reality, but is in search of pure (ideal) pleasure of the eye. Thus the aesthetics of this style lie in the beautiful combination of colors, in the visual pleasure and in their decorative aspect. (What relation does such aesthetics have with daily recreation, aristocratic entertainment and possibly their concerns?)

14. Unlike the official court painting of this period, painting on tiles has properties of its own, which can be listed as follows:

It is large-sized and free from the restrictions of the book and the canvas, for it was used to decorate the interior and the exterior of the houses, gardens, palaces, bath entrances, sport houses, mosques, gates and passages. Therefore, unlike the miniature and professional painting, tilework was a popular art exposed to the public. Through this art, the religious ban on painting faces is not taken seriously; What has been banned actually finds its way into the daily life of the people, practically becoming permitted.
The paintings of tile makers are the continuation of the tradition of miniature and carpet weaving; the same curvilinear arabesque patterns, flowers and birds, and hunting. And wars and parties! Most of the themes are derived from the Shahnameh, love poems and the biographies of the prophets and Imams.

Therefore, this style of painting follows the previous examples in form and in content, displaying heroic conduct, love and religious beliefs, i.e., the traditional culture. And since it derives its themes from “history”, it is in essence a historical art.

Diversity of cheerful, lively and effervescent colors and free-hand techniques to release daring figures are abundantly seen in this art. Owing to all these factors, the product of the hands of tile workers is dynamic and moving, in sharp contrast to the calmness of the brushes of those time’s official painters.

The creators of these works have risen from among the people and learned their craft in the traditional fashion, practically and under instructions by masters. Shiraz, Esfahan, Tehran, Tabriz and Kermanshah were among the centers of painting on tiles.

On Qajar painting

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