A lady seated by a window ledge with her child at her feet, in the style of Muhammad Hasan

Qajar Persia, late 19th Century

Footnotes

Provenance:
Formerly in a French private collection.

The theme of the 'Mother and Child', which is derived from the Christian iconography of the 'Madonna and Child' was depicted widely in Qajar paintings, lacquer pen-boxes and mirror-cases of the first half of the 19th century. Two paintings formerly in the Negarestan Museum, Tehran, and dated circa 1810-20, depict a bare-breasted woman holding a naked girl as opposed to a boy which usually represented Christ in European painting. Afsaneh Najmabadi comments: 'In addition to the many women of pleasure (dancers and acrobats, wine and food servers, musicians), bare-breasted women include representations of European women, and women reminiscent of the Virgin Mary in Madonna and Child paintings. This body of paintings has been a source of disguised pleasure or public embarrassment to Qajar art historians and art collectors. It has also been viewed as an unfortunate effect of European influence on Persian art. Regardless of its origin, European or otherwise, the theme of the bare-breasted woman clearly was a resonant one for male artistic imagination. Within Qajar art, the bare breast stands at once for the comforts of maternal nourishments and for the anxieties of male heterosexual fantasy, a doubling of the 'Mother and the Beloved' that was rooted in child-rearing practices of the period' (see Layla Diba (ed.), Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925, Brooklyn, 1998, pp. 76–85, figs. 27b and 28a.

In discussing a painting of the 'Mother and Child', attributed to Muhammad Hasan and datable to the second decade of the 19th Century, Diba observes that 'images of seductively garbed European women were favoured by Persian painters from the mid-seventeenth century on. Group compositions of one or more women depicted with children and attendants constitute a subtheme that drew upon Christian iconographic types of the Madonna and Child and the Holy Family', and concludes that 'on one level the treatment of the subject alludes to motherhood and fertility. On another, the composition's erotic message is conveyed by the mother's tight-fitting bodice and deep décolletage, emphasizing her breasts framed by delicate floral bouquets, and by the little girl's transparent shift. An unsettling ambiguity between religious iconography and sublimated eroticism pervades this work and contributes to its compelling beauty'. (see L. Diba, op. cit., p. 208, no. 58). The above mentioned observations can very well apply to the subject of this portrait which was painted over half a century later during the twilight of the Qajar era and shows that there was still a demand and nostalgia for that genre of painting.

For further reading, see: S. J. Falk, Qajar Paintings: Persian Oil Paintings of the 18th and 19th Centuries, London, 1972; Irene Koshoridze and M. Friedman, Qajar Portraits: Collection of the Shalva Amiranashvili State Art Museum of Georgia, 2004, OD924; J. Raby, Qajar Portraits, London, 1999; B. W. Robinson, Studies in Persian Art, London 1993; E. Sims with B. Marshak and E.J. Grube, Peerless Images: Persian Paintings and its Sources, New Haven and London, 2002.