The Blind Owl (1937) is Sadegh Hedayat’s most enduring work of prose and a major literary work of 20th century Iran. Written in Persian, it tells the story of a young man’s despair after losing a mysterious lover. As the narrator gradually drifts into madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat’s bleak vision of the human condition.
Sani-al-Mulk’s illustrations for “One thousand and One nights” – (c. 1853).
Mirza Abol-Hassan Khan Ghaffari Kashani, also known as ‘Abol-Hassan the Second’ and ‘Sani-al-Mulk’, is considered the first teacher of European style of painting in Iran.
No anatomical illustrations of the entire human body are preserved from the Islamic world before those which accompany the Persian treatise composed by Mansur ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn Ilyas, who came from a Persian family of scholars and physicians working in the city of Shiraz.
Edmund Joseph Sullivan (1869-1933), was a British book illustrator who worked in a style which merged the British tradition of illustration from the 1860s with aspects of Art Nouveau.
Later in his career, he illustrated the First Version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald, using images of skeletons and animated pots.
The painter and Illustrator Mohammad Tajvidi was born in 1925. After completing his studies at the School of National Arts, he took the position of assistant professor at the school. He was promoted to a senior professorship continued teaching until 1963.
Later he started making illustrations for hundreds of books. He died in Tehran in 1995 at the age of 70.
“The Scrapbook of Professions” is a collection of illustrations from the second half of the 19th century in Iran. It depicts various professions during Qajar period.
In the 11th century, an Iranian known as Ibn Bakhtishu was a physician to the Abbasids in Baghdad. He compiled information about various animals and their uses. Two centuries later the work was translated from Arabic into Persian and illustrated with beautiful miniatures. Today The Morgan Library & Museum is home to this important Persian manuscript, which is regarded by experts as one of the greatest of all Iranian manuscripts.
Flower and Nightingale: a omnipresent theme in Persian poetry and Iranian books illustrations and paintings.
An illustration of a boy, painted based on a copy of a photograph from a Tunisian boy taken in the early 20th century. The illustration is printed and widely distributed in Iran as “Prophet Muhammad in his teenage years.”
→ Photographer: Rudolf Franz Lehnert
→ Muhammad
→ Une étrange rencontre (in French)
