The Qajar Shah commissioned this beautifully decorated pen case, possibly as a gift for one of his sons.
Writing box with utensils, decorated with photographs of Nasir a-Din Shah, his court, and views of Paris and Tehran, Iran, 1860–65, lacquered and gilded wood with applied photographs and silver fittings (Purchase–funds provided by the Friends of the National Museum of Asian Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, S2014.11.1). Speakers: Dr. Simon Rettig, Associate Curator for the Arts of the Islamic World, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Beth Harris, Smarthistory
This lacquered box from 19th-century Iran has a fascinating and uncommon design. In this video, we identify the photographs and poetry lithographs that decorate the box. Then we muse on what these details tell us about its possible owner, likely one of the sons of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar.
0:00:06.6 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re standing in the storage room of the National Museum of Asian Art, and we’ve got in front of us this box that comes from 19th-century Iran, which is especially interesting for its form, its size, but particularly the imagery that it’s decorated with.
0:00:25.1 Dr. Simon Rettig: This is a fascinating object. First, it catches the eye. It’s a large box. It looks like a small piece of furniture and clearly meant to sit on a table. Usually those pen cases are smaller in size, they’re oblong, and they were meant to be slipped into one’s sleeves or put in the belt. That box is different because it is not meant to be carried. You would have here the ink part with all the pen cases, the knives to trim the nib of the pen. Everything would be in that box.
0:01:02.8 Dr. Beth Harris: We see photographs along the top, we see photographs on the sides, and we also have lithographs.
0:01:09.6 Dr. Simon Rettig: Photography was invented in France in 1839. Here we are merely two decades after, and you have an object fully decorated with photographs. Traditionally, it would be decorated with paintings. And painting is just to highlight the photographs. This decoration, which is black and gold, serve as a nice background to the sepia photographs.
0:01:41.0 Dr. Beth Harris: Perhaps it makes sense to start by identifying who it is that we see.
0:01:45.9 Dr. Simon Rettig: On the lid, you have a series of five portraits, and the one in the center is the king. So Nasir al-Din Shah, the signature of the photographer Aqa Riza, is on the tablecloth. So you really need a magnifying glass to see it. That photograph is actually a carte-de-visite, which was very fashionable at the time.
0:02:08.5 Dr. Beth Harris: The Shah himself was an avid photographer and collector.
0:02:12.4 Dr. Simon Rettig: Of course, the Shah is at the center of the lid, but also the whole box, everything converges toward his figure. And on either side you have his two favorite sons, Mas’ud Mirza on the left and Kamran Mirza on the right. And on the far sides, you have ministers. Those are Qajar aristocrats.
0:02:37.0 Dr. Beth Harris: And then, perhaps surprisingly, on the front and the back of the box, we don’t have something from Iran at all. We see Paris.
0:02:45.6 Dr. Simon Rettig: You have five photographs of sites and places in Paris. So those photographs were brought from Paris and put on the box. They sort of represent something exotic for Iranians because Paris is far away and it has already that reputation of the City of Lights. What’s interesting is that on the small lateral size, you have the same photograph of Tehran.
0:03:14.2 Dr. Beth Harris: Which during the Qajar period, is the capital. And in addition to the photographs, we also see lithography in an unexpected place.
0:03:24.0 Dr. Simon Rettig: On the lid, you have a quatrain which is repeated twice from a poet from the 13th century, which is written in a very Persian style of script. Those cartouches with the text are identical, so they’ve been lithographed. They’ve not been written by a calligrapher for the box itself, but they’ve been taken out of a book and placed on the box.
0:03:50.8 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s such a luxurious box, and we’ve got these images of the Shah and his family and these exotic images of Paris. It seems likely that this was made for someone very important.
0:04:03.6 Dr. Simon Rettig: So it’s pure conjecture, I guess, that that box was made for one of the two sons on the lid. And I think that box has a twin somewhere which was probably made for the other brother.
0:04:19.1 Dr. Beth Harris: And let’s talk about what the lithographed image of calligraphy says that might indicate who the owner was.
0:04:26.2 Dr. Simon Rettig: The quatrain is from a Persian poet from the 13th century. And the poem that we read here has been slightly modified, and it reads, “A brave man of great resolution is required, who has been formed by experience and who has fostered wisdom. He who has the base world in his grasp, though hast sheltered in the skirt of aspiration.”
0:04:51.1 Dr. Beth Harris: It does seem like advice for young leaders.
0:04:55.6 Dr. Simon Rettig: It does. And I think it’s really addressed to the princes who are very young. And it’s about seeking knowledge, gaining experience in order to one day rule.
0:05:09.5 Dr. Beth Harris: And experience that is broad, that is global, that is expansive.
0:05:14.1 Dr. Simon Rettig: Exactly. To be a good ruler, you have to be open to the world.
0:05:19.5 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s a lovely gift.
0:05:21.5 Dr. Simon Rettig: Here, with that box, you have Persian artistic traditions, which is lacquerware, coming together with new techniques or new forms of art coming from elsewhere, and in that case, Europe. And those are combined to create something that is fundamentally new and that you don’t see elsewhere, even other countries where you have lacquerware. That is something the Persians came up with. And when those objects entered Iran, they were appropriated in order to make something new.
