At the turn of the 20th century, in the popular art and media of the “West,” the “Middle East” was depicted as a mysterious, exotic region. Cliched images such as camels, deserts, half-naked dancing women, and buildings with minarets and domes were ubiquitous in illustrating anything related to Iran or the Middle East.
Edwin Lord Weeks (1849-1903) was an American artist. He made many voyages to the East, including Iran. In 1895, he wrote and illustrated a book of travels, From the Black Sea through Persia and India, which has many illustrations of Iran (Persia).
Inspired by a Persian incense burner found in an antique store in New Orleans, the architect John Eberson designed the Avalon Theatre of Chicago in late 1925.
Samarkand neighbourhood in Santa Barbara, California, takes its name from Samarkand Persian Hotel. The Persian themed luxury hotel was in operation from 1920 to 1940.
Unlike some other Western painters of the 19th century Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres never went to the East. His sketches of Persian miniatures are to make the décors in some of his “oriental” works as exotic as possible. Here are seven of such drawings which are now kept in Ingres Museum, Montauban, France.
Plates from The history of the feminine costume of the world, from the year 5318 B.C. to our century by Paul Louis de Giafferri published in 1926-1927, New York.
“Persian” costumes worn by young American society women in 1913 & 1914. As you can see the Western perception of Iran in the early 20th century was of an exotic and mysterious land, but today this has changed somewhat.
In 1969 Henry Clarke, a fashion photographer, went to Iran to take a collection of pictures for Vogue. He photographed his models in mosques and palaces in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Persepolis. The pictures were published in Vogue on December 1969.
“Persian Excursion”, Gentlemen’s Quarterly (today’s GQ magazine), October 1969.
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.
