Meidan-i-Chah ou Place Royale, Ispahan
1841
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1841
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Dominant colour
Meidan-i-Chah ou Place Royale, Ispahan is a 1841 watercolor by Eugène-Napoléon Flandin, a Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This watercolour shows a grand square in Ispahan, painted in 1841. The artist recorded the scene while traveling with a French diplomatic mission. The place was built centuries earlier as a polo ground by Shah Abbas. Flandin focused on the palace gate on one side. Its wooden balcony let the royal family watch events below. The mosque stands angled to face Mecca, a key detail. Check out the Victoria and Albert Museum for more travel sketches like this.
The lithograph depicts the vast Meidan-i-Chah in Isfahan, originally designed as a polo ground by Shah Abbas in the early 1600s after he established the city as his capital. At the far end stands the Masjid-i-Shah, the Shah’s mosque, angled to align with Mecca, while on the right the Ali Qapu gatehouse extends a large wooden loggia over the square, allowing the royal family to observe events below. Created during a French diplomatic mission in 1841, the work was part of a broader documentation of Persia’s monuments by Eugène-Napoléon Flandin and Pascal Coste, later published in their…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Eugène-Napoléon Flandin spent years wandering Persia with a sketchbook and a stopwatch, timing how long it took for shadows to stretch across the tile floors of mosques.
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