File:A rare Safavid oil painting depicting a lady (perhaps Hapsburg Empress Eleonore Magdalena of Pfalz-Neuburg) in European dress standing in an interior, Persia, probably Isfahan, middle or second half of the 17th Century.jpg

Persia, probably Isfahan, middle or second half of the 17th Century

oil on canvas, with arched top the painting 178.5 x 158 cm.; with frame 189 x 168 cm.

An undated, unsigned full-length painting shows a lady in European dress standing in a rather dark, if windowed, interior; she faces left and holds a full-blown rose in her right hand. The picture is painted in oil-pigments on canvas. Its pointed, ogival shape identifies it as a decorative element most probably intended for a traditional Iranian structure, having arched, pointed interior niches and windows. Its shape was effected by the addition of a roughly triangular piece of cloth stitched onto the pictorial support, at about three-quarters of its height, probably done well before the picture had been begun.

Occurring together, the classically Iranian shape and the lady's European dress and uncovered head, are unusual. For the painting clearly 'belongs' to a particular type of somewhat earlier 17th-century Persian painting: full-length, oil-painted pictures of men and women, virtually always presented as pairs of the types of persons encountered in 17th-century Safavid Isfahan. Usually it is the Persian style of garb and, and occasional other details, that distinguish the subjects of these paintings as Persians, whether Muslims, or Christian Armenians or Georgians.

At present, over 20 such paintings can be documented, in addition to several other similar pictures with pointed tops, although the broad width of the present painting sets it quite apart from these latter three. Despite its traditional Iranian shape and the European garb of its subject, almost every other element of its setting derives from this odd genre of 17th-century Safavid painting, in which the richest and most impressive of European features figure prominently.

On the table beside the Persian youth in Tehran are the same objects as on the table in the present painting. The numerals on the upper, and larger, of the two clock-faces are given in Roman letters and read, from XII at the top centre, circling downward to the right, in European fashion. Of faint significance may be the fact that on the smaller clock-face of the Bonhams painting, the numerals read in the opposite direction, downward from left to right: I, II, III, VI. At the left of the present painting, just above the table, is an open window, with a view of a landscape with gentle hills in the foreground, and snow-capped mountains in the distance: a somewhat less grand version of the 'Prospect' in all the pictures comprising the 'First Prospect Suite'.

For approximately half a century, the working assumption on the date and origin of these oddly unsettling oil-paintings of standing figures in elaborate 17th-century Persian garb, was that they had been executed in Safavid Isfahan by Iranian painters (of whatever origin, and however skilled they ever became as artists). Such painters had probably learned their practices, techniques, and notions of studio organization from the relatively few artists among the many European travellers who found their way to the city that was 'half the world', as Safavid Isfahan was often then called. Ambassadors from all over Europe - Britain, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Muscovy - were accompanied by yet more diplomats, along with scholars, scientists and artists, merchants and traders, members of many different Christian religious orders, and younger sons, all of whom were deeply impressed by what they saw and those they encountered on their travels. Some so greatly that, on returning to their European homes, they brought with them some visual record of these 'people from parts unknown'. These were either small images drawn or painted on the paper folios of sketch-books or albums, some of which later supplied models for painted images of a larger and more ambitious kind: almost life-size pictures of similar figures painted in oil-pigments on a large cloth-support, given rectangular shape by being tacked onto slender wooden bars. The small paper albums were relatively portable, whereas the life-size oil-painted images could be removed from their stretchers, and rolled up, for the return to a European milieu, as was the case with so many of the later Qajar oil-paintings that that made their way to Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But how, then, to explain the present painting - a bare-headed European lady in clearly European clothing - shown in an Iranian shaped canvas, in a setting full of European objects that had already appeared in one or more paintings, perhaps issuing from the same Isfahani studio, or workshop? What kind of image provided the original model of her garb? An oil-painting? Or a print of such a painting? Both were readily available in 17th-century Isfahan. And was she a commission, or perhaps a local painter's attempt at putting an unusual subject within a painting whose elements he was already familiar with?

Her attire, with its off-shoulder lace-trimmed bodice, is in the European style fashionable around 1680 (see Schut 'Portrait of a Lady', FITNYC, fig. 4) - however oddly it has been rendered. Many jewels are pinned to her lace collar, as are strings or loops of pearls; still more strings and loops of pearls adorn the large golden crown that almost appears to slide off her dark head. Examined carefully, the element rising from the central 'cap' of the crown can be seen to be a golden orb surmounted by a cross. Her red garment is trimmed in delicate gold edging below the white lace at the neckline, as are the slashes on the sleeves above the elbow. The puffy sleeves of her white under-chemise, tied with narrow black ribbons at the wrist, are a striking feature of her garb, unusual in a number of features of 17th-century European women's garments. Nonetheless, her gown has much precious trim: pearled bows are fixed at each shoulder by small, square golden jewels, and a large octagonal gold brooch of similar design is pinned at the centre of the lace at the neck. She wears still more jewellery: two necklaces - a string of larger pearls and, below it, another string of still larger gold beads; a pair of long, pendant gold earring hang in front of the long curls of brown hair falling onto the neck; a gem-set golden bracelet is on each wrist, and a gem-set gold ring is on the little finger of each hand.

Her attire is completed by the large pearl-trimmed golden crown that almost appears to slide off the back of her dark head; its most remarkable feature being the central golden orb surmounted by a golden cross. This is the feature that unmistakably identifies the Crown of Saint Stephen, the Holy Hungarian Crown. It is the 'most important and most ancient symbol of sovereignty' (Pál Cséfalvay, A Thousand Years of Christianity in Hungary, 2002, p. 25), in over ten centuries of the Hungarian monarchy's existence. The crown is a work of the 11th and 12th centuries, but well before the later 17th century (by 1440) it had entered the Hapsburg Treasury. Its presence lends some credence to the proposal that the lady represented in this later 17th-century oil-painting from a Persian working studio, was possibly the Hapsburg Empress Eleonore Magdalena of Pfalz-Neuburg (1655-1720), third wife of the Hapsburg Emperor Leopold I (1640-1705). Several anonymous oil-painted portraits of this lady lend weight to the proposition. One is in Berlin (GG5617); while the other, in the Royal Collections in Britain (RCIN 406641), also shows the 'Hungarian Crown of St Stephen' on a table beside her, a portrait also engraved by the German engraver Peter Schenck the Elder (1660-1711).

The rendition of the lady's face in the present painting has little to do with her face in either of the two anonymous oil-painted portraits of the Empress Eleonore Magdalena. Instead, what the present painting also shares with several other pictures of the larger sub-genre, is the sweetly rounded outline of the face, especially the faces of the couple from Basset Down (now also in Doha: see E. Sims, 'Six Seventeenth-century Oil Paintings from Safavid Persia', in God is Beautiful and Loves Beauty: The Object in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven and London 2013, pp. 340-363, figs. 293-294).