Harvard Art Museums

Portrait of a Youth

Date

mid 19th century

Medium

Opaque watercolor on paper

Culture

Persian

Department

Department of Islamic & Later Indian Art

Institution

Harvard Art Museums

The composition of this portrait study was first outlined in pencil and then blocked out with fields of watercolor, as is evidenced in the sitter’s chair. Next, the artist added opaque watercolor in layers, using fine lines and stippling to replicate the designs and textures of fabrics, most prominently those of the young man’s patterned coat and its gray fur trim. In contrast to his brightly colored clothing, his face is generally pallid, but blues beneath his chin and mouth suggest the hint of a beard. The play on near monochrome is continued in the silhouetted, inky locks that frame his face and give way to a tall black hat. The subject’s position in the composition and aspects of painterly execution such as the modeling of his face and hands suggest that the image was based at least in part on a photograph, a practice common among Qajar artists from the mid-nineteenth century onward, photography having been introduced in Iran in the 1840s. The painting reflects the “new realism” introduced by Abu'l-Hasan Ghaffari, also known as Sani' al-Mulk, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96), and disseminated by his contemporaries. Ghaffari’s work combined physiognomic likeness with the psychology of the subject to produce an often intense pictorial effect—a “real” presence—undiminished by rich decorative details, which in some artists’ hands might emphasize surface at the expense of illusionistic volume and depth. Although this portrait lacks the overall impact of a work by Ghaffari, it demonstrates its painter’s participation in what was new at the time. On the lower right side of the sheet, a barely visible inscription, which reads, tasvvr-i dukhtar-i Shahrukh (depiction [by] the daughter of Shahrukh), is tantalizing because it suggests a female artist. Unfortunately, however, this notation is too perfunctory and too uncertain in date to permit further conclusions.

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