Kajar painting: a window into the life and fashion of Muslim harems of past centuries

About how life and the manner of dressing Muslim women in harem look like, European people for a long time made representations according to the fantasies of painters. These fantasies usually included a lying naked woman in European style (less often – standing) and a couple of slaves in the eastern surroundings. Meanwhile, during the reign of the Qajar dynasty, portraiture blossomed in Muslim Iran, thanks to which you can see how orientalist artists guessed or did not guess with their canvases. Just say: naked women are there.

Just as the East influenced Europe, giving rise to fashion for huge Indian shawls and turbans, which became the women’s headdress in the West, so the West influenced the fashion of the East. It was under the impression of Western paintings that a new portraiture and genre painting developed in Iran, sometimes very bizarrely combining the traditions of a flat, stylized oriental portrait and Western realism. Since the painters were very dependent on customers, the images, first of all, indulged the tastes of customers and did not allow excessive experimentation. So the style of the artists under the Qajar dynasty is pretty uniform. Continue reading →