Home > Digitized Walters Manuscripts

This document is a tranformation of a TEI P5 XML manuscript description incorporating images. If you have trouble reading special or non-Latin characters on this page, please make sure you have appropriate Unicode fonts installed and an up-to-date web browser.

Walters Ms. W.749, Single leaf of plowing and selling produce

Browse images (Browse images in a new window) | TEI in XML format

Shelf mark

W.749


Manuscript

Single leaf of plowing and selling produce


Text title
Plowing and selling produce

Abstract

This drawing was executed in Safavid Iran, most probably in the late tenth century AH / sixteenth CE, in Qazvin or Isfahan. Above, a farmer plows; below, a seated young man watches a produce seller weigh his purchase. On the rocks in the center foreground is inscribed the name of one of the most famous painters in Iran in the eleventh century AH / seventeenth CE, Riẓā ʿAbbāsī (fl. 1001-1044 AH / 1591-2 to 1634 CE). As the handwriting does not match that of the artist, an admirer of Riẓā’s work seems to have attributed the drawing to him. The execution and the bucolic subject matter of this drawing relate closely to the oeuvre of the Persian artist Muḥammadi Haravī (fl. late tenth century AH / sixteenth CE), who worked in Qazvin. It is possible that this composition was conceived as a manuscript page.


Date

Late 10th century AH / 16th CE to early 11th century AH / 17th CE


Origin

Iran (Qazvin or Isfahan)


Artist

As-written name: Riẓā ʿAbbāsī

Name, in vernacular: رضا عباسى

Note: Later spurious attribution


Form

Leaf


Genre

Historical


Language:

The primary language in this manuscript is Persian.


Extent

Foliation: Not applicable


Dimensions

17.5 cm wide by 28.5 cm high


Layout
  1. Image: 8.7 cm wide by 14.2 cm high

Contents:
fols. W.749a - W.749b:
  1. Title: Plowing and selling produce
  2. Artist: Riẓā ʿAbbāsī
  3. Decoration note: Salmon-colored paper with illuminated flora and fauna motifs for border; framing lines in blue, white, gold, and black

Decoration:

fol. W.749a:

  1. W.749, fol. W.749a
  2. Title: Plowing and selling produce
  3. Form: Drawing
  4. Label: The inscription Riz̤ā ʿAbbāsī appears in the rocks in the center foreground (a later spurious attribution). The image is surrounded by a border of two-toned floral and fauna motifs on salmon-tinted paper.

Acquisition

Walters Art Museum, 1952, by purchase


Bibliography

Grube, Ernst J., and Alberta Maria Fabris. Muslim Miniature Paintings from the XIII to XIX Century from Collections in the United States and Canada: Catalogue of the Exhibition. (Venezia: N. Pozza, 1962), 117.


Contributors

Principal cataloger: Gacek, Adam

Catalogers: Landau, Amy; Smith, Sita

Editor: Bockrath, Diane

Conservators: Jewell, Stephanie; Quandt, Abigail

Contributors: Barrera, Christina; Emery, Doug; Herbert, Lynley; Noel, William; Simpson, Shreve; Tabritha, Ariel; Toth, Michael B.; Valle, Chiara


Publisher

The Walters Art Museum


License

Licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Access Rights, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode. It is requested that copies of any published articles based on the information in this data set be sent to the curator of manuscripts, The Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21201.