CALLIGRAPHY BY MIR 'ALI, SHAYBANID BUKHARA, CIRCA 1550

This folio, and that of the following lot, come from an album the bulk of which is in the Fogg Art Museum, formerly in the collection of Louis J. Cartier (1958.63-74; M. Shreve Simpson, Arab and Persian Painting in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1980, nos.76-85, p.74 and Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity, London, 2021, pp.294-5, no.7). One of the folios from that group is signed by the calligrapher Mir ‘Ali al-Haravi.Many of the folios from the album are arranged in the same format to ours, with two figures framing two lines of elegant nasta’liq. Another folio from the same album was in the Art and History Trust Collection (illustrated Abolala Soudavar, Art of the Persian Courts, Geneva, 1992, p.212, no.79). In the entry to that folio, Soudavar writes that the calligraphy was probably incorporated into an album in Bukhara in around 1560, when the city was ruled by the Uzbek ‘Abdullah Khan (Soudavar, op.cit., p.212). It would have been then that the fine illumination and illustrations were added.

According to Dost Muhammad in his preface to the Bahram Mirza album, Mir 'Ali Haravi, 'the rarity of the age' shows such mastery of nasta'liq that his inimitable work 'cannot be described by the pen's tongue or by the two-tongued pen' (W.M. Thackston, A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, Cambridge, 1989, p. 343). A student of Zayn al-Din Mahmud and Sultan 'Ali Mashhadi, the work of Mir 'Ali was widely-respected not just by his patrons, among whom were the Safavid prince and calligrapher Sam Mirza, and the Uzbek ruler 'Ubaydullah Khan, but also by subsequent generations. For example, the Mughal emperor Jahangir describes in his memoirs how he received a copy of Jami's Yusuf wa Zulaykha in Mir 'Ali's hand worth a thousand gold mohurs, and his grandson learned to write nasta'liq by imitating pages by Mir 'Ali (Annemarie Schimmel, 'The Calligraphy and Poetry of the Kevorkian Album', in S.C. Welch et al. (eds.) The Emperor's Album: Images of Mughal India, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987, pp. 34).

Two other folios from this album recently sold in these Rooms, 27 April 2023, lots 5 and 6.