FOUR LACQUERED PAPIER-MÂCHÉ PEN CASES (QALAMDAN) WITH EUROPEAN FEMALE PORTRAITS
Late Qajar Iran, late 19th - early 20th century

Each with rounded ends and sliding trays, polychrome-painted, heightened in gold, and decorated vertical-format Western female portraits, the top and sides of one painted with long oval cartouches respectively featuring a European lady's seated portrait with lush floral bouquet above and underneath it and two romanticised landscape views with rivers inspired by Russian prototypes, the ends with gol-o-bolbol compositions encased within European-style gilt vegetal meanders and grids, the underside and inner tray with similar gilt vegetal trellis against a black ground, 22.8cm long; another, similar, in a slightly more naive hand, with a pink-clad lady standing in the central oval cartouche, holding an umbrella and a drinking cup, with stylised landscape views on the sides and smaller oval medallions filled with wild animals, the top signed Sani' Humayun and dated 1301 AH (1883 - 1884 AD) in silver, the underside and inner tray with a floral spray in gold against a black round, the inner tray containing some calligrapher's tools like a dawat (inkwell) and a soot measuring spoon, 20.5cm long; and two smaller pen cases, one with a painted portrait of a white-clad lady standing by a baluster, surrounded by oval medallions on the top and sides filled with pairs of wild animals, perhaps a symbol of companionship and marital devotion, 19.5cm long, and the latter with a Qajar couple clad in Western clothes on the top, interspersed amidst typical gilt flower sprays, vegetal meanders and colourful rose bouquets against a dark brown ground on the top and sides, 19.5cm long.

The composition on the pen case with the seated European lady is almost identical to another one produced in Shiraz, signed Lutfallah al-Hamzawi and dated 1314 AH (1896 - 7 AD), now in the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art - LAQ510 (N. D. Khalili, B. W. Robinson, and T. Stanley, Lacquer of the Islamic Lands: Part 2, 1997, p. 230, fig. 456). Iranian models of this kind bear very little from their original Qajar compositions. They are quite clearly indebted to the late 19th-century lacquer prototypes produced in Russia for the Iranian export market. Indeed, the very portrait on our pen case is a copy from a well-known composition present on a Russian lacquered pen box (LAQ129), part of the same collection (ibidem, p. 224, cat. 448), which since then has been repeated on several qalamdans becoming a 'staple' image. By the last quarter of the 19th century, both Russian and Japanese lacquer manufacturers were targeting the Qajar market, attracted by the Iranians' persistent appreciation for this medium (M. Farhad, M. McWilliams and S. Rettig, A Collector’s Passion: Ezzat-Malek Soudavar and Persian Lacquer, 2017, p. 35). It wasn't long before the Iranian craftsmen started reproducing the imported models from Lukutin and the Fedoskino factory, making the luxury import goods with European portraits and elongated oval cartouches with Russian romantic landscapes available to a broader local audience.

The second qalamdan from the left in the picture shows striking similarities in terms of pictorial style, subject, and decorative vocabulary to three pen cases in the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art attributed to the oil portrait painter Muhammad Baqir Samirumi (1866 - 1937), active at the court of Mas'ud Mirza Zill al-Sultan (N. D. Khalili, B. W. Robinson, and T. Stanley, Lacquer of the Islamic Lands: Part 2, 1997, p. 248, figs. 483 - 485). In particular, the pen case in fig. 484 presents identical bucolic views with cattle, ibexes, and pairs of parrots on the side and top, like our qalamdan. For further information on Muhammad Baqir Samirumi's artistic career, please read the footnote of lot 61.