Royal Portraiture: A Visual Narrative from Qajar Age A Critique on the Book “Qajar Portraits”

The present book, entitled “Qajar Portraits”, in the form of a handbook by Julian Raby, a researcher in the field of Islamic Art and former director of the Freer and Sackler Gallery in Washington, was published in continuation of the "Qajar Royal Paintings" exhibition which was held in London in 1999. The author's purpose in writing this book, in addition to introducing the 43 works displayed in the exhibition, is the visual analysis of these works in a socio-historical context. The period intended by Raby in this book is not the whole of the Qajar age, but a century of it, including the beginning of the reign of Fath Ali Shah until the end of the reign of Nasser al-Din Shah (1213-1313 AH). Because from the author's point of view, these two kings had a special place in the development of Visual Arts, or in other words, the Image in the Qajar age. In this study, we also intend to review the method of presenting and examining the visual works mentioned in this book, identify the mental pattern used by Raby in classifying and introducing them, and based on that, his approach to analyze the Visual Arts of the Qajar age, whose works are often created in the context of the artistic main stream of that time, named Royal Portraiture