In the workshop - Illustration taken from a manuscript compiled by Nematullah Khalifa in 974 AH.

In the workshop - Illustration taken from a manuscript compiled by Nematullah Khalifa in 974 AH.

Bukhara, Shaybanid period, dated 1567

Gouache and gold on paper, mounted as an album page with gilded margins, animated with storks, deer, and flowering branches. Framed under glass. On the back, a transcribed label with the number 29172. Page: 25 x 15 cm Scene: 12 x 7 cm At the top of the painting is a Persian inscription in white within a blue frieze mentioning: "Completed for one worthy of the emirate at court, close to his excellence the Khaqan, Nimatullah known as Khalifa ,may his fortune and greatness prosper, in the year 974". He was a Sufi prince close to Abdullah Khan II, the Shaybanid sultan of Bukhara. This Nimatullah Khalifa is the same one who commissioned and compiled another anthology, copied by Ali Reza al-Katib in 1565, and auctioned by Millon in Paris in 2012, with 20 paintings and described in S.Melikian-Chirvani, The anthology of a sufi prince from Bukhara, in "Persian Painting", London, 2000, pp.151-200. The school's iconographic theme is traditionally illustrated for episodes selected from a Persian poetic work. This miniature, reassembled without its text on an album page with gold drawings in the margins, probably refers to the anecdote of the schoolmaster in the Maghreb, recounted in the seventh chapter of Saadi's Golestan. It depicts a school classroom with an arcade decorated with polychrome foliate scrolls, where young pupils, seated on a refined carpet, are reading manuscripts, while one of their classmates is being reprimanded by a preceptor. A rare vestige of Bukhara's royal workshop in the mid-16th century. Provenance : Jean-Charles Tauzin Collection (1889-1957) Inside the workshop, an illustration from a manuscript compiled by Nematullah Khalifa in 974 A.H., Bukhara, Shaybanid period, dated 1567