A PORTRAIT OF A WESTERN-CLAD GENTLEMAN
Late Qajar Iran, dated Safar 1326 AH (12 March 1908 AD), signed Sani al-Sultan

Oil on canvas, the vertical-format painting portraying an elderly bald gentleman with a thick white mustache and goatee, dressed in typical Western clothes with a high-collared white shirt and dark grey jacket, the pictorial style embracing European standards of realistic portraiture, signed in red in the lower right corner Sani-as-Sultan in both English and Persian, and dated Safar 1326 AH and 12/3/908, marked 'no. 2', mounted, 68.5cm x 56.5cm.

An almost identical portrait of a Western artist signed by Sani al-Sultan and dated 9 February 1908 was sold at Christie's London, 5 October 2010, lot 277 for £3,000 GBP hammer. The sitter has been identified as Ben Jour, a tutor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. This leaves us wondering who the gentleman in our lot could be. Given the chronological proximity and stylistic analogy with Christie's portrait, one could speculate our sitter is another tutor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts or a German man of knowledge, possibly a doctor, scholar, or engineer, who sat for the Persian painter around the same time of the other portrait.

Another theory is that the portrait depicts a Westernised version of Mirza Khalil Khan Saqafi (1863 – 1944), a physician, educator, bureaucrat, diplomat, essayist, and translator, who studied modern medicine at the Qajar polytechnic college known as Dar al-Funun. He was appointed A'lam al-Dowleh (the Most Learned of the State) and became Muzaffar al-Din Shah's personal physician and close confidant. He also played a crucial role in drafting the first constitutional text of Iran, following the Enghelab-e Mashruteh (the Persian Constitutional Revolution) in 1905.