Private Collectors of Islamic Art in Late Nineteenth-Century London

The Persian Ideal

Isabelle Gadoin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367766030
• eBook ISBN: 9781000437003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This book examines British collectors of so-called Persian art (a broad umbrella term then covering a large portion of Islamic art) in the late 19th century, including ceramics, metalwork, carpets, textiles and woodwork.

Based on a foundational event, the very first exhibition of "Persian and Arab Art" held by a London Gentlemen's Club in 1885, this book follows one generation of men, retracing the subtle shades of difference among "amateurs, " "connoisseurs, " "experts" and "collectors, " and exploring all the mechanisms of the construction of a collective fascination for the Orient. Isabelle Gadoin uncovers some of the first "scientific" analyses of Islamic objects and of the first private notebooks or exhibition catalogues, to provide an in-depth study of the way Westerners talked about Islamic objects and began to define what would become Islamic art history. All the while, Gadoin unravels the skein of Western prejudice, Romantic fancy, sincere admiration and ruthless appropriation, in art collecting, to write a new chapter of Orientalist history.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of collecting, colonialism and postcolonialism, and Orientalism.

1 Victorian Travellers to Iran

Discoverers or Plunderers?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167709-2

In the mid-1860s, Charles James Wills (1842–1912), who had just qualified as a medical man, answered an advertisement from the Indian government and got a position in Iran as a doctor in the Indo-European Telegraph Department. Wills was only 24 and turned for information to a senior officer who had spent many years in the country. The latter, Wills remembers, merely offered him a copy of James Morier’s picaresque novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824):

Colonel G certainly took great trouble to explain to me all about the country, and, taking me out to lunch with him, bought me Morier’s “Hadji Baba,” saying, “When you read this you will know more of Persia and the Persians than you will if you had lived there with your eyes open for twenty years.” This is going a long way; it is seventeen years since I went to Persia, and I read “Hadji Baba” now, and still learn something new from it. As Persia was in Morier’s time so it is now; and, though one sees plenty of decay, there is very little change.¹

Morier’s novel was written in the first-person point of view, as if coming straight from the mouth of a native, Hajji Baba, a clownish rogue with a knack for getting into scrapes but who always emerges unscathed thanks to his mischievous imagination. In other words, the novel, under pretence of faithfully portraying life in Iran, actually planted in its readers’ minds the idea of the essential “Persian” as a hypocrite and a trickster, a poseur and a pedant, shrewd and smart but also cowardly and deceitful. In spite of that—or perhaps because of that?—the novel was extraordinarily popular in England and was to act as a powerful filter for travellers intent on “discovering” the famed land then called “Persia.”

That the officers of the Indo-European Telegraph in the 1860s should have relied for information on Iran on an English novel published some 40 years before shows the astounding persistence of that reading grid. And the fact that the novel, albeit based on real knowledge of life in Iran, was a deeply satirical work, if not a caricature of the Iranian nation, of course made that supposedly reliable source of information all the more dubious. Yet for most of the 19th century, Iran was seen through the distorting lens of literature, fancy and prejudice. Wills spent 15 years in Iran—far more than Morier himself—and was much better acquainted with the country than the latter. And yet, for all his irony about the “great trouble” taken by the officer who handed him Morier’s novel, he actually concurs with his superior’s flippant attitude, since he too ends up insisting on the informative value of Morier’s extremely entertaining but also severely prejudiced text: “I read ‘Hadji Baba’ now, and still learn something new from it.” Wills’s allusion to the novel comes at the very beginning of his own travel narrative, on page three exactly, as if he wanted to place his own text under Morier’s tutelary authority—though there is actually very little in common between Morier’s fanciful comic-epic novel and Wills’s own realistic strand of travel-writing. From the publication of the former’s novel in 1824 to that of the latter’s travelogue in 1883, the Hajji Baba stereotype thus guided the footsteps, and informed the minds, of English travellers to Iran. And for many of them, the dream of “Persia”—the name systematically used as a synonym for wealth, culture, delicacy and art—partly obliterated what Iran truly was.

Let us look first at the context for the creation of Hajji Baba. James Justinian Morier (1782–1849) had discovered the country with the diplomatic missions which presented Iran to the English public at the very beginning of the 19th century. The country was then in the hands of the Qajar dynasty (1779–1924). The illustrious reign of the Safavids (1501–1722), whose splendid ruler Shah ’Abbas was Queen Elizabeth I’s contemporary, was a far-away memory, but it obstinately stuck within the collective imaginary in England. Compared with Safavid glory, 19th-century Qajar Iran could easily appear to have been going through a long period of decadence, as Wills suggests through his ambiguous formula, which both posits and denies the idea of the country’s “decay”: “though one sees plenty of decay, there is very little change.” The only thing given for certain here is the country’s absence of progress. Indeed, the fall of the Safavid dynasty had ushered in a long and troubled period when various dynasties fought for power. After the Zand dynasty, which briefly took over in the second half of the 18th century (1750–94), the Qajars tried to assert themselves as the legitimate descendants of the Safavids. Iran was then weakened by political turmoil and economic instability. In the absence of clear succession rules, power was disputed after the deaths of Fath ’Ali Shah, in 1834, and of his successor, his grandson Muhammad Shah, in 1848. Short civil wars ensued, but throughout the 19th century, the Qajars remained in power, controlling many of the provincial governors.

Their power was all-pervasive. The second ruler of the Qajar line, the famous Fath ’Ali Shah (reigned 1797–1834) was said to have been survived by “158 wives, 57 sons, 46 daughters, and 600 grandchildren.”² His great grandson Nasir al-Din Shah (1831–96, reigned 1848–96), Victoria’s contemporary, tried to fight the Orientalist cliché of the Eastern despot and to define himself as a mild reformist, but he was often more concerned with the defence of his own power and prestige than with the efficient governance of the country. In 1851, he had banished his prime minister, or “Amir Kabir,” Mirza Taqi Khan, whom he had initially entrusted with the modernisation of the country; a few months later he purely and simply had him executed. When trying to define the exact status of the country then, today’s historians hesitate between the vision of a “decadent” country held back by the weight of archaic rules and that of a slowly modernising economy. Abbas Amanat, in his masterful biography of Nasir al-Din Shah, calls this an age of “transition,”³ since the country then evolved from traditional, if not mediaeval institutions, to more modern structures. John Perry insists on this transitional moment by remarking wittily that “one is tempted to tack the qualifier ‘quasi’ onto every phase of this punctuated evolution”: from a “quasi-empire,” he notes, the country became a “quasi-colony” shared by Britain and Russia, to then provide an arena for a “quasi-revolution” with the Constitutional crisis of 1906, when the first consultative assemblies—or majles—were formed and when the pale figure of Muzaffar al-Din Shah (reigned 1896–1907), the son and successor to Nasir al-Din, was brushed offstage.

The Qajars however succeeded in preserving the territorial integrity of the country, which remained unified within more or less stable frontiers. Striving to dissociate themselves from the Safavid capital of Isfahan and from the Zand stronghold of Shiraz, they deliberately moved the seat of power to Tehran, which still remained a small lacklustre provincial city. There, they laid down the foundations of a new, more centralised type of monarchy. But there were strong provincial obstacles to central power. Until almost the end of the century, regional governors like Zill al-Sultan, the governor of Isfahan, remained great potentates who sometimes controlled armed forces superior in number and force to the army of the Shah. Moreover, religious power, held by the major Shi‘ite leaders of the country, contended with secular power. Provincial, tribal and religious loyalties were strong, and high-ranking officials pursued policies of favouritism, multiplying incentives, gifts and spoils in order to bypass their rivals or weaken their power. The degree of bureaucratic corruption everywhere impeded the march towards democracy.

The Great Game

On the international stage too, the status of Iran was an ambiguous one. Officially, it was an independent country, the only one in the Middle East not to have fallen under the direct rule of the Ottoman Empire. But this independence was mostly theoretical, and historians defined the diplomacy of Iran in the 19th century as a “bipolar” one, because it turned alternately to either Britain or Russia for support. Britain feared the expansionist ambitions of Russia in the Caucasus and on the Caspian coast, which directly threatened “the Jewel in the Crown,” India. In order to preserve access to India and to the Persian Gulf, where British presence had long been established thanks to the East India Company, Britain aimed to turn Persia into a “buffer state”—one strong enough to resist Russian advances yet weak enough to be easily manipulated.

Two wars between Iran and Russia at the beginning of the century had resulted in heavy defeats for Iran: after the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, it had had to cede part of its Caucasian provinces to Russia; and after the particularly damaging Treaty of Turkmanchay in 1828, some more provinces of the Caucasus again went to Russia. On the Eastern frontiers with the local provinces or khanates of Central Asia—roughly corresponding to today’s Afghanistan—the threat of a Russian invasion also weighed like a sword of Damocles, and diplomatic tensions remained high throughout the century. As well as fighting off Russian incursions, Britain also wanted to protect the Afghan cities of Herat and Kabul from the Iranians themselves, who still coveted those strategic Central Asian places that had once been part of their empire. A number of serious scuffles and wars opposed Iran and Britain, notably in 1856–57. It is this global atmosphere of rivalry and distrust, with both Britain and Russia tryi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Victorian Travellers to Iran: Discoverers or Plunderers?
• 2 Setting Down the Bases of a New Discipline: The First Analyses of Islamic Art
• 3 The 1885 Exhibition of “Persian and Arab Art”
• 4 A New Sociology of Collecting
• 5 Islamic Objects at Home
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index