A KALAMKARI COTTON HANGING OF BAHRAM AND GOLANDAM
Isfahan, Post-Qajar Iran, ca. 1930s

A KALAMKARI COTTON HANGING OF BAHRAM AND GOLANDAM
Isfahan, Post-Qajar Iran, ca. 1930s

The long rectangular joined panel of fine cotton painted and block-printed with two related episodes from the story of the Persian king Bahram and his beloved Chinese courtesan Golandam, both characters featured in Nizami’s Haft Peykar, illustrating the virtues of practice and resulting skill, and the equivalent in Persian of the saying ‘Practice Makes Perfect’, as coined by the poet Nizami himself, the border block-printed in blue and red with a frieze of dorsant birds interspersed with stylised lotus flowers, floral stems at the top, the field painted in blue, red, and dark manganese brown, the top of the hanging with the king amazed at the sight of the delicate young maiden carrying a bull up the flight of sixty stairs, the king’s aide-de-camp in the margin, the lower level of the narrative with Golandam observing the king’s skill at connecting the deer’s ear with its hoof with a single arrow at her request, the lower left stamped Negarestan Hossein Fakhari in Persian nasta’liq beneath the workshop’s logo of the winged lion, 276cm x 155cm.

The political hanging dating from 1932 in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection (ME.1-2003), recently exhibited at the V&A Epic Iran exhibition (13.02.2021- 12.09.2021) in London, comes from the same Isfahan workshop of the present lot.

(Quantity:1)

Dimensions: 276cm x 155cm