Court Portraiture

Court Portraiture is a book written by Alireza Baharloo and Kianoush Mo’taghedi. This work falls under the categories of research literature and history, focusing on the art of painting and portraiture during the Qajar era. It primarily examines works housed in Russian art museums. The book takes a specialized approach to Qajar portraiture and highlights nearly a hundred works of royal, popular, and religious visual arts from the Qajar period, providing analysis and introduction. Published in full color and glossy paper over 160 pages, “Court Portraiture” presents important and lesser-known Qajar artworks held in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Moscow museums, and the National Museum of Georgia as key sources for researching Qajar portrait art. This book explores the Qajar art collection in Imperial Russia and investigates pieces mainly created during the reigns of Fath-Ali Shah and Mohammad Shah Qajar in Iran, which were later acquired by Russian imperial collections. Various chapters introduce and detail the history of these works, with the final chapter focusing on Qajar pictorial traditions as the beginning of a modern style in Iranian portraiture, highlighting significant differences from the past. The portraits in the book are categorized by subject and theme, each section accompanied by descriptive and analytical text. The authors selected images and traced visual developments through three main sources: museum visits, studying books and catalogs, and accessing online museum collections and portals.