In this fascinating study of the interplay of imported and domestic imagery in Qajar Iran, Mary McWilliams describes a lacquer pen box decorated with “doll-like figures of Persian and European men enjoying the company and favors of Persian women” (p. 45). What is interesting is not the prurient predictability of the central scene so much as the source of the adjacent portrait of a young woman, looking out to the viewer as she poses her tilted head over an arched left hand. For, as McWilliams explains, building on the research of Parviz Tanavoli with reference to the recently acquired Harvard Qajar Album of artists’ preparatory sketches, the woman on the pen box is a reworking of a Parisian chromolithograph by Bernard-Romain Julien that was also decoratively pasted on an interior wall in the Zavelian house in Esfahan, the home of the Nurian family of Armenian merchants who imported goods from Europe. As many similar examples show, Iranian painters working with the traditional materials of lacquer and paper adapted to the rise of lithography, and in turn photography, in ways that reveal much about the impact these imported technologies had on Qajar society at large.
Based on an exhibition with the same title at the Harvard Art Museums, Technologies of the Image comprises an introduction and four thematic chapters followed by a catalogue of the seventy-seven items in the exhibition (six paintings, fifteen manuscripts, twenty engravings and lithographs, and twenty-eight lacquer items). Drawing on this evidence, and selected comparanda from other collections, the four main chapters focus on the common corpus of imagery that, from the 1850s in particular, was increasingly shared across Qajar lacquerware, lithography, photography and painting. While bringing art history into conversation with the history of the book, the volume not only moves beyond the categories of the decorative or minor arts to show the eclectic vitality of Qajar artistic innovation. It also uses the deliberate miscellany of items in the exhibition as means of reflecting on wider processes of social and economic change as Iran increasingly interacted with the industrializing cultural economies of Europe.
In his introductory essay, David J. Roxburgh challenges old but persisting negative stereotypes about the artistic decadence of the Qajar era by drawing attention to the spread of new artistic approaches, both at court and beyond, as imported “technologies of reproduction” reached more strata of Iranian society. The method Roxburgh devises, both for the exhibition and its ensuing book, is to bring together old and new media of imagery, by way of illustrated manuscripts and lacquerware on the one hand and lithographs and photographs on the other, in order to demonstrate how each interacted with and informed the other. By drawing on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grussin’s work on “remediation,” Roxburgh argues that the new technological and artistic practices of the Qajar period witnessed “the free mobility of the image across mediums and systems of duplication” (p. 4) as shared and borrowed imagery increasingly came to feature on a range of different objects. After contextualizing these developments amid the urban and architectural modernization programs of Naser al-Din Shah, he shows how the period witnessed not only the adaptation of European motifs and models alongside technologies, but equally saw Qajar artists appropriate older Persian artistic forms, and occasionally sites, particularly via the “Persopolitan style.” Thus, he concludes, a key feature of Qajar art across its various forms is “its insistent contemporaneity in dialogue with a broad spectrum of objects whose chronology extended from the immediate past, to the Safavid period of the 1600s and 1700s, and still further back in time” (p. 19).
The next chapter, by Mary McWilliams, develops then applies this approach more fully by examining the ways in which lacquer objects served as media of exchange with Europe. Having originated in Timurid Herat, then evolved through the influence of East Asian lacquerware imported to Safavid Iran by the Portuguese and Dutch, the lacquer objects produced in the Qajar period provide a revealing optic for the processes of exchange with which McWilliams is concerned. Before examining particular objects, she outlines a dynamic of Perso-European exchange in the fuller hermeneutical sense of a two-way process: as European technologies and printed images were imported to Iran, they impacted the design of lacquer objects that were in turn exported to Europe and displayed there at trade fairs alongside the very commodities being exported to Iran. She then demonstrates this dynamic in detail through a discussion of various technical and compositional practices, including the use of a range of visual “direct quotations” from the many European engravings and lithographs sold in Iran. An example, echoing the one with which this review began, is the reproduction on lacquer objects of an engraving of a languid reclining nude with cherubs, originally painted as a watercolor by the British artist Richard Westall (1765‒1836; better-known, incidentally, as the portraitist of the young Byron). While this was in part the continuation of the Safavid eroticization of the “zan-e farangi,” there were more innovative developments in play, and in tracing these McWilliams is aided by the aforementioned Harvard Qajar Album, a design handbook of preparatory sketches that enables her to show precisely how such imported engravings and lithographs were transferred onto pen boxes, mirror cases and book covers.
Aptly, the next chapter, by Farshid Emami, turns to the printed images on paper that circulated so widely, and influentially, in Qajar Iran by way of a study of lithography. Building on the work of Ulrich Marzolph and Ali Buzari, the chapter looks not only at lithographic images in printed books, but also at single-sheet portraits and, briefly, posters. After summarizing some of the scholarship on the introduction to Iran of the “stone-writing” technique invented by the Prague-born playwright Alois Senefelder, Emami surveys the range of media to which lithography was subsequently applied in Iran, where from the 1860s lithographic images circulated more widely via their incorporation into Persian newspapers and then journals. Emami is particularly interested in lithography’s “central role in the formation and dissemination of new expressions of popular piety” (p. 56), as exemplified by Tufān al-bukāʾ, a Shiᶜi martyrology composed in 1250 AH/1834 and reproduced over the following decades in multiple illustrated editions. Linking to the larger themes of the volume, Emami also argues for the impact of lithographic images on tiles, paintings and lacquer, and while this isn’t fully demonstrated, it is taken up in the chapters by McWilliams and Roxburgh.
Next, Mira Xenia Schwerda turns to the spread of photography in Qajar Iran, attempting to move beyond what she sees as the predominantly courtly focus of earlier scholarship to trace the wider circulation of photographic images “made and acquired by sub- or non-royal agents” (p. 81). In doing so, she emphasizes not merely the movement of photographs themselves, but also the mobility of their producers as they trained in Europe (the Russian Empire especially), whether in Tbilisi in the case of the well-known Armenian-Georgian professional Antoin Sevruguin (c. 1840‒1933) or Saint Petersburg in the case of the little-known amateur photographer (and governor of Azerbaijan) ᶜAli Khān Vāli (1846‒1902). Usefully echoing Emami’s discussion of the lithographic image, Schwerda argues that, as photographic imagery moved beyond the court to the “studio” and “street,” not least via postcards documenting the Constitutional Revolution, “photography evolved from a court curiosity to an agent for social and political change” (p. 100).
In the final chapter, David J. Roxburgh returns, and responds, with a study of the impact photography and lithography had on ink and watercolor painting by asking how Qajar portrait painters “assimilated, remediated and recast” specific images produced by these mechanized tools. Rather than being evidence of artistic failure, or the “loss of a native Persian tradition” (p. 108) under pressure from Europe, he argues that painterly responses to photographs and lithographs comprised another instance of assimilating then remediating imported technologies. As such, via an analysis of around twenty portraits (mainly on paper, but some on papier-mâché pen boxes), Roxburgh concludes that, whether in court-sponsored workshops or the bazaar, new technologies actually served to “reinvigorate” artistic practice.
The most notable contribution of this volume is its development of an interactive approach that positions the various Qajar visual art forms in relation both to one another, internally with regard to Iran, and in relation to inspiring motifs and enabling technologies, externally with regard to Europe. This is not only helpful in art historical terms, in supporting Roxburgh’s case for the vigor of Qajar art, but also in broader historical terms in moving beyond the politics of foreign relations to show how the Qajar engagement with the European powers played out in cultural and aesthetic terms. From this perspective at least, the Qajar encounter with Europe was one of negotiation rather than domination as different techniques and technologies were appropriated and then, in varying degrees, assimilated to preexisting tastes and traditions. If no longer a particularly original take on “the Western impact on [wherever],” it is a broadly convincing one that stands in solid consensus with studies from other parts of the world.
The very strength of this art historical counterblast to conventional (albeit now increasingly dated) wisdom on the Qajars is also the source of its key weakness. For the weight of historiographical attention to Iran’s relations with Europe drags the authors’ attention to focus predominantly on London, Paris and occasionally Saint Petersburg, imperial metropoles in turn viewed predominantly from Tehran. Yet, as betrayed by the occasional reference to Bombay and Tbilisi in the chapters by Emami and Schwerda, Iranian access to the technologies of reproduction at the heart of the volume often took place not in the distant capitals of Europe but in imperial ports and border cities considerably closer to home, chiefly Bombay and Tbilisi but also Calcutta, Astrakhan and Istanbul, each of which housed communities of Iranian merchants and exiles who were deeply involved, indeed invested, in printing words and images. Not only were Persian texts lithographed in Bombay before Iran but, as numerous Qajar travelogues recount, Tbilisi was also the primary site for the Iranian encounter with such unfamiliar art forms as theatre, as well as with such technologies as photography, lending Sevruguin a considerably larger context. Attention to these mediating Asian inter-spaces of the Qajar encounter with “Europe” also pays a domestic dividend by drawing the center of scholarly gravity away from Tehran, as connected capital cities give way to the mercantile, political and religious networks that linked Tabriz with Tbilisi and Istanbul, Shiraz with Calcutta and Bombay, and Anzali with Astrakhan and Baku.
Drawn from both ends of the period on which Technologies of the Image mainly focuses, two examples of this visual traffic suggest the importance of these extra-European sites of image exchange. The first is the use of illustrations by the artist ᶜAli Akbar in an 1849 Shāhnāmeh lithographed in Bombay as the model for the Qajar-era sculptures in the port of Bandar-e Tāheri (today Bandar-e Sirāf).Footnote 1 The second is the incorporation in the 1907 Mikādonāmeh of Hosayn ᶜAli Shirāzi, printed in Calcutta on the press of the Persian exile newspaper Habl al-Matin, of dozens of dramatic illustrations copied by a Bengali artist named Bose from originals produced for the London Illustrated News by the Dutch military painter Hermanus Willem Koekkoek (1867–1929).Footnote 2 As these two among many examples suggest, attention to such under-explored routes of visual traffic not only has the potential to de-center Europe and dethrone Tehran, but also to recognize a wider range of technological and aesthetic middlemen involved in the process of “remediation.”
These are, however, mere suggestions for future stages of investigation. For now, the four contributors to Technologies of the Image have succeeded admirably in comparing then connecting a variety of visual forms in a way that presents the Qajar engagement with the outside world as a complex collage of images both domestic and imported. Replete with illustrations of striking complementarity and contrast, Roxburgh and McWilliams’ book has the additional aesthetic merits of being richly and handsomely produced.
