Discovered by Wiltshire auctioneer Robert Finan in a property in Bournemouth, a previously unrecorded and complete set of four near contemporary copies of the Negarestan murals now holds the joint record for any work of art sold in the UK outside London.
The original murals, since destroyed, were executed by a team of artists under 'Abdallah Khan in the Negarestan Palace, Tehran, during 1812-13. They depict an imaginary gathering of Fath 'Ali Shah's court with attendant foreign envoys. The panels, offered for sale at the Old Ship Hotel in Mere on June 12, were copies on a miniature scale, probably commissioned by the ruler of Qajar c.1815 as diplomatic gifts or to commemorate the completion of the palace and its paintings. Little is known of their subsequent history.
There are four panels in all, each painted in oil with a liberal use of gold on canvas. The smaller central panels show Fath 'Ali Shah enthroned attended by 12 of his sons (see bottom right) and six ghulams (warrior slaves). The two largest panels, measuring around 13in by 4ft 2in (33cm by 1.27m), depict rows of courtiers and visiting envoys, including the representatives of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, Sind and Arabia, who had been received at court on different occasions. In these Mere paintings, as in the original murals, each of the 118 figures are identified in white script.
The British represented to the lower right on the panel top right, together with the dates of their missions are: Sir John Malcolm, envoy of the East India Company (1809-11); and Sir Gore Ousley, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (1811-14). The French, on the other large panel, are Napoleon's envoys General Claude Mathieu de Gardane, Joseph-Marie Jouannin, and Amédée Jaubert.
Only three other complete copies of the Negarestan murals, none with inscriptions, are known to survive (two are watercolour on paper, the other oil on canvas) while four other examples, although bearing inscriptions, are incomplete.
They include the three similarly-sized oil on paper panels (one large panel missing and the images cropped) sold by Sotheby's on October 18, 1999 for £80,000.
Finan & Co.'s panels were offered in unrestored condition, with tears and splits but no loss and retaining their original pegged pine stretchers and dilapidated but contemporary English rosewood swept frames.
With competition from five telephone lines beginning at £34,000, bidding rose to £500,000 at which point they were sold to a UK dealer wishing to remain strictly anonymous.
The Court of Fath 'Ali Shah panels now share the accolade of the highest price ever achieved at auction outside London with a pair of Sèvres swan-neck vases that also made £500,000 (plus 12 per cent premium) at Lacy Scott & Knight in Bury St Edmunds in March 1999. In February this year Cheffins of Cambridge sold a pair of white marble figures of Vulcan and Venus for £450,000 (plus 15 per cent premium).
