Persia on the Hudson: Ali Muhammad Isfahani and Ceramic Production in Nineteenth-century Iran

July 22, 2020

Farshid Emami is an assistant professor in the department of art history at Rice University. He is a historian of Islamic art and architecture with a focus on the early modern period and particularly Safavid Iran. He completed his Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in 2017. He is currently completing a book manuscript that offers a new narrative of architecture and urbanism in seventeenth-century Isfahan, the Safavid capital, through the analytical lens of urban experience. Drawing on unstudied primary sources, the book takes the reader on journeys through Isfahan’s markets, gardens, and coffeehouses, analyzing how the city fostered new human experiences and became a setting for fashioning selves.

Besides his publications on Safavid art and architecture, Farshid Emami has written on a range of topics in art and architectural history, including lithographic printing in the nineteenth century and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in the Muqarnas, Metropolitan Museum Journal, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Asian Studies, and International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Among the works kept at Olana are a group of ceramic tiles and objects attributed to Ali Muhammad Isfahani, a master of ceramic production active in Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century during the late Qajar period (1789-1925). This presentation examines the imagery, iconography, and provenance of this corpus, particularly focusing on the figural tiles installed at two fireplaces at Olana. An examination of the context in which these tiles were created and transferred reveals that they do not merely reflect a traditional craft but were also products of the emerging tastes of the late nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America as well as in Qajar Iran.