A maiden resting in a landscape, Persia, Isfahan, Safavid, circa 1656-80

Ex-collection Hagop Kevorkian (1872-1962), New York, before 1962.

Sotheby’s, London, 7 April 1975, lot 62.

Babaie, Porter and Morris, 2017, p. 33

This is an interesting painting that represents a transitional phase between the Isfahan style of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, epitomised in the work of followers of Reza-i Abbasi such as Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Qasim and Muhammad Yusuf, and the so-called Europeanising style of the later seventeenth century. The basic composition, with a large figure in the foreground, holding and surrounded by objects such as a wine bottle and cups, reclining in a landscape with a rocky hill in the background, is inherited from of the Isfahan school of circa 1620-50. But the style of the face, figure and garments of the maiden, and the particular manner in which the cloudy sky, rocky hill, tree and grass are rendered represents an evolution of this style in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. Close comparisons can be found in two drawings in the British Museum (1920,0917,0.271.4, see Langer 2013, cat.94, pp.196-6, and 1920,917,0.281.2, see Stchoukine 1964, pl.LXXIX), Finally, the tufts of flowers by the stream and in the foreground, and the distant townscape show more emphatically the influence of the Europeanising style of the later seventeenth century.