Octagonal Shaped Tile with a Woman Bust in "Kubachi" Style

Octagonal tile with the bust of a woman

This octagonal tile belongs to the so-called Kubachi pottery group. Kubachi is the place-name of a village in Daghestan where many of these pieces were found, although it is believed that they were actually produced elsewhere in northwestern Persia. This distinctive technique is rarely used for tile production: it usually consists of a limited palette of colors, white, black, blue, and turquoise painted under a transparent whitish or greenish glaze; however, the majority of tiles also include orange-yellow, red, and green colors. This tile is one of the very few produced in the classical chromatic Kubachi style. The scene depicts the bust of a young woman with typical Safavid features; on the blank background are a bottle, an iris, and small clouds; the whole painting is enclosed in a multilobed blue border. The tile, itself a finished painting, was probably part of a panel where each element contained the bust of a figure, as can be seen on a panel in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the whole panel, therefore, produced a composition rather different from the large garden paintings made in the cuerda seca technique described for MMA 03.9b.

[Carboni and Masuya 1993]

Marking: - Sticker below base: Austellung Muham. Kunst / Muenchen 1910 / Austeller: Kelekian / Ort: Paris / Lide. Nr. 57A

[ Dikran G. Kelekian (American, born Turkey), Paris, in 1910]; Johanna Garz, Karlstadt am Maine, Germany (until 1961; gifted to MMA)

Theresienhöhe. "Meisterwerke Muhammedanisher Kunst," 1910.

New York. Hagop Kevorkian Fund Special Exhibitions Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Persian Tiles," May 4, 1993–January 2, 1994, no. 38.

Carboni, Stefano, and Tomoko Masuya. Persian Tiles. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993. no. 38, p. 43, ill. (b/w).