Spring is here, and with it came auction catalogues! London houses have once again presented a great selection of amazing objects, including some things expected, and some really not. The first major surprise came from Bonhams. For the first time in… forever, probably, Bonhams is not participating in the Islamic week, their auction being pushed to the 23^rd May. This is most likely due to the Parisian auction held by Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr (a.k.a. Bonhams Paris) on the 6^th April, with a catalogue of 144 lots. Understandably, it would have been a struggle for the experts to carry two auctions less than a month apart. At the time I am finishing this article, the auction made  €229,792.50 (including premium) with 75% of lots sold. Congratulation to the team for these results.

London Islamic week will start on Wednesday 26^th April at Sotheby’s, which will present a small but action-packed catalogue of 175 items, including 40 carpets. The 27^th, Christie’s will offer 240 lots, including 70 carpets. On Friday 28^th, Chiswick and Rosebery’s will hold their auctions at the same time, Chiswick with two catalogues: part 5 of their single-owner sale in the morning with 90 lots, and 335 lots in the afternoon, and Rosebery’s with one catalogue of 528 lots including 56 archaeological artefacts and 33 contemporary art pieces.

Moving the Borders

This spring, the inclusion of several artefacts gives an impression that the field of Islamic and Indian art history is expending, shedding light on productions usually considered to be at the edges of the Islamic world. Sotheby’s presents two fragments of Qur’an in bihari script produced in pre-Mughal India: 35 illuminated folios which would have deserved a longer notice for their connexion with folios from other collections such as the Khalili (QUR602) and the Louvre (MAO937), valued at £26,000-35,000, and 5 folios from a different manuscript, decorated with very particular polychrome vegetal illuminations, offered for £15,000-20,000. Christie’s presents two illustrated folios from a Khusro nameh of ‘Attar, attributed to 15^th century India (previously attributed to Southern Iran), “Imam ‘Ali fighting a Lion” for £7,000-10,000, “Hurmuz healing Jahan-Afruz” for £5,000-7,000. Rosebery’s shows three manuscript fragments: a juz, three folios, two folios, all for very small prices. Sultanate manuscripts never achieve incredible prices, but the presence of this many in the sales might be the beginning of something.

Sub-Saharan manuscripts are also given the spotlight by Sotheby’s and Roseberys. These are usually reserved to mid-range auctions, and it is rare to see them included in top-end catalogues. Islamic art in Sub-Saharan Africa is a fairly new field that is expending slowly, so it is good to see it being given some well-deserved attention. Two beautiful Qur’anic manuscripts with their carry case from Nigeria or Chad are offered at Sotheby’s for £8,000-12,000 (lot 14 and 16), and an illuminated collection of prayers from 19^th century Sudan is valued at £4,000-6,000. Additionally, an unusual wooden Qur’an board from Somalia is given at £3,000-6,000. Roseberys offers two Ethiopian Qur’an manuscripts with lavish decoration, as well as compilations of prayers likely copied in 19^th century Horn of Africa.

Christie’s is offering a wonderful concertina manuscript from 19^th century Burma (today Myanmar) with a rich and intriguing iconography for £1,000-1,500, which would have deserved more explanations, as well as a “Siirt” silver-inlaid bronze candlestick from 14^th century Anatolia with Armenian inscriptions that illustrate perfectly the movements of artefacts in and out the borders of the Islamic world. Two Armenian artefacts are also offered at Chiswick, a Qajar brass tray and two crucifixes, and a complete Armenian gospel at Roseberys. 18^th century Greek-Ottoman, Syriac, Coptic and Hebrew productions are also represented, all being parts of the large and undefinable Islamic world. Finally, Roseberys will present juz‘ of Chinese Qur’an manuscripts, as they have done for several seasons.

With the increasing difficulty to source new objects for a developing market, expanding the field appears a necessity. The progress of academic research also give light on previously unknown productions, highlighting their aesthetic and historical value. This is a win-win for both parties, and potentially a good investment for buyers, as these objects will most likely gain value in the next years.

Pushing the Chronology

Geographical boundaries are not the only one being pushed this season, it also feels like the chronology is expending. Persian paintings illustrate this well, with a qualitative selection of a large range of historical productions, starting with the 14^th century until the 2000s. Two folios of the same Shah Nameh produced in Persia in 741/ 1341 (under the Inju dynasty) are presented, “Faramarz lifts Surkha, son of Afrasiya, from the saddle” offered by Christie’s for £8,000-12,0000, “The fight between Nowzar and Afrasiyab” offered by Roseberys for £6,000-8,000.

For the 15^th century, Chiswick is offering an illustrated Shah Nameh page from Western Persia (£300-500), as well as Roseberys, presenting a restored page from an unidentified manuscript (£1,000-1,500), Christie’s an extraordinary full-page painting from Timurid Herat (150,000-200,000). 15^th century Persian painting for every budget! The 16th century is represented by a painting from a manuscript Akhlaq-i Muhsini of Husayn Va’iz al-Kashifi (Sotheby’s, £10,000-15,000) and of course, a new page from the Shah nameh of Shah Tahmasp, a folio illustrated by a nocturne combat scene, offered at Sotheby’s for £4,000,000 – 6,000,000, the top lot of the season. In its centre, Bizhan slaying the Turanian leader Nastihan, surrounded by the Iranian army chasing the rest of the raid. As always, the level of details on the painting is astonishing and there is no doubt people will queue to see the page. The previous page sold at Sotheby’s last season achieved £8,061,700, the year before one sold at Christie’s for £4,842,000, I am therefore very curious to see if prices will continue to increase. Usually, fight scenes sell for less than other types of illustrations, but this is the most sumptuous Persian manuscript ever created, so the rule might not apply. If you want to learn more about this extraordinary manuscript, you can listen to the episode of the ART Informant podcast with Dr Firuza Melville.

Two pages signed by Mu’in Musavvir are offered by Christie’s. He’s not the most famous painting of the second half of the 17^th century, but his work has been well studied, in particular by Dr Massumeh Farhad, so the pages should sell well (here and there). A beautiful oil painting signed by Muhammad Baqir, one of the stars of the 18^th century, who notoriously collaborated to the decoration of the St Petersburg album, and dated 1173/ 1659-60 is also at Christie’s for £150,000-250,000. Zand productions are not the most studied, but this painting seems like a safe bet. Lots of Qajar gol o bolbol and beautiful ladies are offered everywhere (as well as couples in compromising positions and a puzzling “ring of 10 intertwine youths” at Chiswick!), and interestingly, late 19^th and early 20^th century paintings, such as the portrait of Zahir al-Daula, son-in-law of Nadir al-Din Shah Qajar, dated 1301/ 1884 (Christie’s, £120,000-180,000), and another portrait from the same time, this time of an unknown dignitary (Chiswick, £2,000-3,000). Several Iranian artists are represented at Roseberys, including Maryam Shirinlou (b. 1966) who has been doing solo exhibitions since the 1990s.

The inclusion of Persian painting from different eras is not new on the market, but the offering is particularly consistent and will most hopefully show what will be the trends going forward, especially for later periods.

Trendy Blades

Arms are clearly having a moment in the sun this spring. They already shone bright last year in Paris, with category white-glove sales at Artcurial and Millon, so we can expect high success in London as well. Christie’s top lot is a 17^th century Mughal gem-set dagger with impeccable provenance: it was first in the hands of Lord Robert Clive of Plassey (or his son), and last in the al-Thani collection (Qatar reigning family), which is partly exhibited in the Hotel de la Marine in Paris¹; an impressive pedigree! Value at £300,000-500,000, it is remarkable for its atypical proportions and the uniquely large stones that ornate the hilt. To be noted that other Indian lots come from the al-Thani collections (67 to 76), all the highest quality. I am particularly excited to see the 18^th century silver and gilded durbar set (£250,000-350,000)

Speaking of pedigree, Sotheby’s present two historical swords: one gilt-mounted sword with ruby eyes and scabbard from Tipu Sultan’s armoury (£200,000-300,000), and the beautifully simple personal sword of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r.1658-1707): ‘The Army’s Conquest’ (£150,000-200,000), Chiswick also includes two Indian blades among the top lots, a 19^th c. “Sosun Pattah” ceremonial sword (£4,000-6,000) and an 18^th-19^th c. jade-hilted “khanjar” with garnet beads (£4,000-6,000). Several other swords and blades are presented by the four houses, so it’ll be interesting to see if the success encountered in Paris in winter 2022 will be duplicated here. Maybe swords are the new manuscripts?

My Top 5

To finish, someone asked me on Instagram what are my 5 favourite items this season, and I thought it would be a fun way to end this article. Here they are, with little explanation and in no particular order:

• The page of Shah Tahmasp’s Shah Nameh. Obviously (Sotheby’s, lot 41)
• Five pages from a Qur’an produced in Sultanate India. I posted about it on Instagram, they really caught my eye. Only one other page of this manuscript has surfaced so far, presented at Rim Encheres earlier this year [efn_note]Thank you to Rim Mezghani for the reminder[/efn_note]. The illumination design and colours are simply exquisite (Sotheby’s, lot 4)
• “Solomon with the Queen of Sheba”, Timurid Herat, mid-15^th c. I adore Timurid painted productions (illustrations and illuminations), and this scene, with its profusion of figures, elements and gold, simply makes me happy. Look in particular at the Queen’s expression looking at Solomon, we all deserve someone who looks at us like that (Christie’s, lot 25)
• An illustrated Tarikh-i Dilgusha-yi Shamshir Khani, Lahore or Kashmir, 19^th century. This text, which is basically an abridged version of Firdosi Shah Nama, was written by Tavakkul Beg in 1063H/ 1653 and encountered a certain popularity in India.² Kashmiri 19^th century paintings are a hit or miss, to say the least, but the 24 illustrations in this manuscript are really nice. (Chiswick, lot 434)
• “A lady writer with hookah”, Pahari school, Kanrga or Guler, North India, mid-19^th c. Powerful feelings emanate from this scene, art resonates. (Rosebery’s, lot 94).

1. Parts of the collection were sold at Christie’s New York in 2019.
2. Pr Charles Melville dedicated a paper to the topic, available on Academia.

The Islamic Art market is like some mystical creature living in a deep forest. Everybody has heard about it, and many will tell you they have seen it, but everybody gives different descriptions, apart that it has eyes and a tail. What I’m trying to say, with this unnecessarily convoluted metaphor, is that the art market keeps surprising me. Items surprise me, but also the ability of experts to unearth forgotten treasures and to slap completely random prices on them, that keeps surprising me.

Bonhams opens the week on the Tuesday 25th with a catalogue of 157 lots, but is also holding an online auction between the 20th and the 28th October with a catalogue of 249 lots. Sotheby’s, follows on the 26th with 195 lots. Christie’s offers a larger catalogue of 265 lots on the 27th, including 102 carpets. Finally, a probable organisational mishmash makes Chiswick and Roseberys share the Friday 28th, Chiswick with two catalogues of 89 and 360 lots, Roseberys with a catalogue of 497 lots, including 79 lots of antiquities and 30 lots of contemporary art.

The selection is large and include wonderful pieces for every budget, as well as intriguing items, such as a small Qajar painting in an extraordinary wooden frame, offered by Rosebery’s at £200-300, and a very amusing page showing Maharana Jagat Singh in the most lively margin of elephants and animals, offered at £500-700.

Manuscripts and Paintings, stars of the show

Bonhams seems to be shifting its strategy slightly by holding two auctions simultaneously, one in the auction room on the 25th, and another online, over 8 days starting on the 20th. The physical sale includes pieces between £200-300 and £90,000-120,000 and will appeal to the most fortunate collectors, while the online auction include more items, all between £200-300 and £5,000-7,000, with some lots sold without reserve, and some as low as £5. Both auctions include paintings and isolated pages, but only 3 manuscripts. Supply chain issue or deliberate choice to focus on other media, I cannot tell, but the absence is definitely intriguing given the popularity of manuscripts in past UK and French auctions, and the sheer volume of manuscripts presented by the other auction houses this autumn.

Chiswick offers several interesting manuscripts in both auctions, including a Mughal Qur’an signed and dated 1145 H./1732 valued at £6,000-8,000, and a Safavid poetic anthology from the 17th c., incomplete but interesting for it contains the full page drawing of a standing man, in a format usually reserved for album pages. The manuscript could probably be use as a case study on provenance: it bears seals, dedications, modern collection stickers and even comes with a letter from George Anavian on behalf of the late professor Ehsan Yarshater to Dr. Marilyn Jenkins Madina, one of the curators of the Islamic Art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated 27 September 1983. Offered at £800-1,200, it is a bargain for anyone interested in book history.

40% of Sotheby’s auction is composed of manuscripts, isolated pages and paintings, including 9 volumes from the Shakerine collection which was dispersed by Sotheby’s in October 2019. The sale had done well, but not all lots were sold. On the nine manuscripts offered this fall, only an illuminated Qur’an juz from Ottoman Turkey was previously sold £5,000 (incl. premium), and all the lots are now offered with estimations slashed by 25% or more. It will be interesting to see if they sell, this time around. Sotheby’s is clearly riding trends in this auction. A monumental Qur’an page from the 8th c. is offered for £250,000-350,000, from the same volume as the page sold by Millon Paris for €600,000 in June. The page was last sold by Sotheby’s in 2016 for £85,000, so given the result of the French auction earlier this year, we can understand the rush to resell.

The star of the show is of course the page of Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnama, offered for £4,000,000- 6,000,000, following the page of the same manuscript sold at Christie’s in March this year for £4,842,000. This high price has encouraged Sotheby’s to push the estimation even higher. Every single one of this page is an event on its own, and the painting on this one is particularly glorious. William Dalrymple wrote about the page in the sale catalogue, which baffles me. Mr Dalrymple is a great historian and a fantastic author, but he is not a specialist of Safavid Persia, nor of the Shahnama, nor of the arts of the book. Why not ask one of the many experts of the field for their informed opinion? For this reason, I have invited Dr Firuza Melville, director of the Cambridge Shahnama Centre for Persian Studies, to speak about the manuscript on the ART Informant podcast. The episode will be out on the 17th October, so stay tuned!

Rosebery’s is also coming in strong with Shahnama pages, including one page of the so-called Freer Small Shahnama, produced in Iran c. 1300-1340 and bearing the illustration of “Sawa Shah slain in battle by Bahram Chubina” (£3,000-4,000), and an illustrated page of one of the so-called Small Mongol Shahnama, made around the same time as the Freer Shahnama (£3,000-5,000), as well as other, Deccani and Qajar.

Let’s mention here the painting of a black and white bird signed by the famous Persian painter Riza ‘Abbasi, offered by Christie’s for £100,000-120,000. This particular page hadn’t been seen since its first appearance on the market in 1961, until last summer when it was sold in France for €36,000 on an estimate of… €100-150. The snarky comments write themselves.

Finally, it is interesting to note the prominence of Indian painting. I mentioned this summer that Indian painting didn’t sell well in Paris, so I am particularly interested to see what it will do here in London, though previous auctions have showed that the medium usually encounters success. I never counted the Indian paintings in London auctions before, but because I found the catalogues particularly submerged in Indian paintings this time around, I decided to count. Christie’s catalogue includes 13,2% of Indian paintings, Roseberys 15%, Sotheby’s 15.3%, Bonhams live 17,8%, Bonhams online 25.3%, and Chiswick 30,2%, with a rough total of 310 isolated pages produced in India, excluding illustrated manuscripts, more than 17% of all lots combined. There are some really wonderful treasures among all this mass, but I don’t know where to start, I feel genuinely overwhelmed. As for manuscripts, I wonder when Indian paintings became so prominent, but more importantly I wonder if such volumes are sustainable in the mid to long term. Am I the only one feeling this “Indian painting fatigue”?

Provenance, prices … All these random things

In this day and age, it becomes risky to present a star lot without provenance. Of course, the interested buyer can contact the expert and ask, but it seems like good practice to put it directly in the catalogue, both ethically and commercially. The stakes are high to sell the most expensive lot, because even if auction houses often achieve better results with smaller items selling above their range, an unsold star lot represents a significant loss of investment (in terms of research and cataloguing time and resource, advertisement, freelance experts, etc.), as well as bad publicity. One will remember the two pairs of glasses presented by Sotheby’s last Autumn, which I had questioned on this blog; Sotheby’s had contracted William Dalrymple and an independent consulting firm, with additional support (paid or not) from Dr Usha R Balakrishnan and Pr Ebba Koch. These glasses had a number of issues, including the complete absence of provenance in the catalogue, and remained unsold.

Bonhams has a tendency to omit provenance, but it is never systematic. Their most expensive item is a late 13th century Mamluk silver-inlaid brass penbox offered for £90,000-120,000. At this price, potential buyers should not have to work to find out where it comes from. Oddly, the second star object, a group of Safavid niello and gem-set gold jewellery offered at £80,000-120,000, has a provenance line. Go figure.

Christie’s is changing gear with their top lot, presenting a Mughal pashmina carpet from the mid-17th century for £2,500,000-3,500,000. I imagine that this piece might be acquired by a museum, as the infrastructures required for conserving textiles are particularly complex. I am not a carpet specialist, so I couldn’t say if the very high price is justified or not. Let me know your opinion in the comments, and let’s see what the market decides.

For £15,000-20,000, Sotheby’s offers an 18th c. Ottoman Qur’an of 573 folios, 10 lines by page, measuring 26.6 x 16.4 cm, with no date, signature nor provenance. Christie’s offers for £2,000-3,000 an Ottoman Qur’an of 228 folios (no mention whether it is complete or not), 15 lines per page, 16.9 x 10.7 cm, signed Muhammad, known as Ferayazi, dated 1172 H./ 1758, from the collection of Michel Abemayor (1912-1975). The writing is of better quality in Sotheby’s manuscript, but it doesn’t fully justify the immense price gap between the two, and I struggle to understand how these prices were attributed. Sotheby’s Qur’an is too expensive and Christie’s Qur’an is too low-priced. Someone, somewhere, has some explaining to do.

Bold Attributions or Misleading Captions?

Christies’ second-highest lot gave me pause, and raises the issue of attributions on the art market. A beautiful album page bearing, on one side, a painting of a night hunt scene produced in India circa 1691, and a calligraphy signed ‘Imad al-Hasani on the other side. The page is presented as coming from the famous St Petersburg muraqqa’, an album produced in Persia after the sack of Delhi in 1739 by the army of Nadir Shah Afshar. Most of the album is kept in the Institute of Oriental Studies in St Petersburg, but some of the pages were dispersed before it arrived in Russia and sometimes appear on the market. One page was sold at Millon Paris in 2019, for instance. Other times, pages resembling to those of the album are wrongly attributed to the volume, such as one offered by Sotheby’s in 2018. The present page could be linked to the album for its size (47.8 x 32.5 cm, the St Petersburg album is 47.5 x 33 cm), and the fact it bears a calligraphy of the Persian master ‘Imad al-Hasani, predominant in the original volume, however (yes, in bold) the margins are signed Muhammad Yazdi and dated 1247 H./ 1831-32, some 80 years after the latest date in the album, 1172 H./1756-57. The catalogue entry deals with this crucial information like an afterthought, mentioning it in the very last paragraph and adding that: “The St. Petersburg Muraqqa’ was however never completed and we know that many of the margins and borders were not finished in the 1750s. This might be a later attempt to complete it.” The keyword is in the last sentence, “might”. There is no evidence whatsoever that the album decoration was continued after 1757, and we don’t even know what the complete album even looked like. This lack of nuance is extremely misleading.

Another jump to conclusions is the attribution of a Safavid papier-mâché mirror case to Muhammad Zaman, valued at £50,000-70,000. With the amount of scientific literature widely available on the topic, I simply do not understand that we can still give every random piece under the sun to the painter Muhammad Zaman, on the base that they look Safavid, and that they bear the inscription “ya saheb al-Zaman“. Many legitimate signatures are known for this painter, some in the aforementioned St Petersburg muraqqa‘, but the attribution of this inscription to him has been questioned many times, and the fact is that nothing tangibly links this “crypto-signature” to him. The scenes on the mirror case are indeed close to his style and can be compared with signed works such as the Khamsa of the British Library, but an attribution is not a signature.

Bonhams also drops Muhammad Zaman’s name for a page of the album made in 1888 for Nasir al-din Shah Qajar (£15,000-20,000), recognisable by its margins covered in decoupage motifs, but states that the painting is “in the manner of”, which is a lot better.
This album is problematic and needs to be briefly mentioned here. Pages have been frequently appearing on the market for the past few years, with little to no provenance. Also appearing on the market are empty margins from the same album: Chiswick is offering 6 in one lot as part of their morning, single-owner sale. The margin of Bonhams’ painting resembles very closely another margin offered by Chiswick last year (but is not identical), and because the complete album has never been seen, I think we need to keep an eye on the isolated margins being sold and potentially reappearing not empty. That or I’m being paranoid. In the same auction, Chiswick is also presenting two loose calligraphic panels from the same album, this time without their margins (except for a small band bearing the characteristic decoupaged motifs).

A lot more can be said about these catalogues, but this article is already too long. I am genuinely excited to go to London and see the exhibitions, but also to see what the market will decide. Bonhams is taking risks by focusing on metals in their live auction, Medieval ceramics are as strong as they have ever been, Iznik are full of promises, I could go on forever. Let’s meet on this blog after the auction to debrief!

1. The catalogue can be downloaded in PDF here. Thank you to Benedict Carter for providing me with the link that I couldn’t find.
2. Most recently by Dr Amy Landau in her doctoral dissertation “Farangī-Sāzī at Isfahan : The Court Painter Muhammad Zamān, the Armenians of New Julfa and Shāh Sulaymān (1666-1694)” and by Dr Mélisande Bizoirre in her doctoral dissertation: “a Hache et Le Rossignol: Productions Artistiques En Iran Après La Chute d’Esfahān (1135/1722-1163/1750)”.
3. See Amy Landau’s article in Muqarnas 28 (2011).