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THE BORDERS SAFAVID IRAN, SECOND HALF 16TH CENTURY, OR MUGHAL INDIA, FIRST QUARTER 17TH CENTURY; THE PAINTING LATER The borders of blue ground, with decoupé gold-outlined floral meander with birds perching on leafy tendrils, verso mounted with a later archaistic illustration depicting the Prophet Suleyman seated in a golden domed pavilion conversing with a follower, a winged angel behind him, surrounded by birds, animals and demons, a text panel below with an inscription in red nasta'liq, the numerals '28' in the upper left corner of the borders, recto with the same illumination in the borders drawn out in gold, with 15ll. of black nasta'liq with important words picked out in red, a catchword in the lower border, the borders with some worm holing, mounted, an old collection label on the reverse of the mount Painting 6 ? x 3in. (15.9 x 7.8cm.); folio 10 3/8 x 6 ?in. (26.5 x 16.5cm.)
These very powerful margins have obviously been produced using a stencil; the design is the same in mirror image from one side to the other. The interest in large-scale stencilled floral designs set against a blue ground can be tracked back to the early Timurid period, frequently in borders, but also sometimes as the main composition, as in an album page drawn in Yezd in 1431 (Roxburgh, 2005, fig.77, p.153). This continued into the Safavid period, as in an album (H.2161) in the Topkapi Palace Library (Roxburgh, 2005, pp.234 and 180). The same Istanbul album, created for Amir Ghayb Beg in 1564-1566 has borders of similar strength and contrast to the present example, but even so the scale of the design is smaller and more intricate than that seen here. In their strength and vitality these borders are reminiscent of the slightly later album borders produced for 'Abd al-Rahim, the Khan-i Khanan of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Best known is a copy of the Panj Ganj now in the Chester Beatty Library (Leach,1995, vol.II, pp.567-578). Another manuscript with comparable borders was sold in these Rooms, 11 April 2000, lot 65.
The present borders are exceptional in that the design is not only stencilled, but also découpé, which is not the case in any of the examples discussed above.