A TINTED DRAWING OF A RUSSIAN FIELD ARTILLERY SUB-OFFICER WITH CANNON
Iran, late 18th - early 19th century

Opaque pigments, pencil and ink on paper, the vertical composition depicting a sub-officer for the Imperial Russian field artillery next to an iron cannon, holding a tall stick with two types of brushes on its terminals to clean the bore and muzzle, wearing white baggy trousers, red-lined brown jacket and the typical black bicorne with tall two-tone feather plume, a hat widely adopted in the 1790s as an item of uniform by European and American military and naval officers, within red and black rules, mounted on a cobalt blue album border, with a handwritten Persian numeral '48' in the upper left corner in sepia ink, mounted, in the back of the mount an old inventory sticker from H. P. Kraus, Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York, Portrait of a Russian Officer, Qajar style 19th century, with a Christie's London barcode, glazed and framed, the illustration 17cm x 10.5cm, 38cm x 30cm including the frame.

This fine tinted drawing exemplifies the intense exchanges taking place between Russia and Iran in the 18th and 19th centuries. The style and painting techniques of the illustration are clearly Iranian, but the subject and the attention to the faithful rendering of the military costume of the sub-officer meet a clear ethnological and topographical interest, especially prominent in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.