A MONUMENTAL LATE SAFAVID CUERDA SECA POTTERY TILE PANEL, PERSIA, 18TH CENTURY

Bonham's London, 1 May 2003, lot 298.

Ex-collection William Randolph Hurst, CA (1863-1951).

This pottery tile panel is one of the elaborate and colourful cuerda seca designs of the Safavid court. The panel depicts the prophet Joseph and Potiphar's wife – known as Yusuf and Zuleykha – a tale from the Qur’an later retold by Jami.

Cuerda seca (Spanish for ‘dry cord’) developed as a technique alongside tile mosaics in the latter part of the fourteenth century in Central Asia and consisted of complete tiles painted with coloured pigments which were separated from each other to prevent running by an oily substance mixed with manganese, which left a dark lining after firing (see Porter 1995, pp.19-20). The technique continued to be utilised throughout Persia into the seventeenth and early into the eighteenth century. Panels consisting of multiple tiles were typically used for architectural adornment and frequently portray narrative scenes from literature. This present lot in this way resembles inv.no. EA1979.16 from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, with its forty-eight tiles to the forty-five of the present lot and inv.no. EAX.3135, also from the Ashmolean, a Qajar equivalent of the same scene from the Yusuf and Zuleykha story.