JONAYD-E NAQQĀŠ

 

JONAYD-E NAQQĀŠ, a painter of the 14th century, known from one reference and one picture. Dust-Moḥammad Heravi (q.v.), in his preface to an album of paintings and calligraphy (H. 2154, Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesı, Istanbul) completed in 951/1544 for the Safavid prince Bahrām Mirzā, gives an account of painters of the 14th century which mentions Ostād Jonayd Baḡdādi (Thackston, pp. 12-13). Jonayd was evidently active in the time of Sultan Aḥmad the Jalayerid (r. 1382-1410); his master, Šams-al-Din, had worked under Shaikh Ovays (r. 1356-74); and Šams-al-Din’s master, Ostād Aḥmad Musā, worked in the time of Abu Saʿid Bahādor Khan. Ḵᵛāja ʿAbd-al-Ḥayy (q.v.), also a pupil of Šams-al-Din, and perhaps more esteemed, was transported from Baghdad to Samarqand by Timur, but it appears that this did not befall Jonayd. Already by the 1930s (Binyon et al., p. 185, n. 2) scholars were convinced that this Jonayd was one and the same as Jonayd, naqqāš al-solṭāni (painter in the service of the sultan), whose name appears in an illustration in the fragmentary Ḵamsa of Ḵᵛāju Kermāni (Add. 18,113, British Library, London), and by its titulature confirms the patronage of Sultan Aḥmad. The text, copied in Baghdad by Mir ʿAli b. Elyās Tabrizi Bāvarči, is dated 798/1396; the illustrations may be marginally earlier, since they seem designed for a larger work and contain one duplicate line. The manuscript was later restored for Bahrām Mirzā. Jonayd’s signature appears incorporated into folio 45b, “Wedding night of Homāy and Homāyun;” it is rendered as though worked in red glass set in a stucco window in the upper left of the scene (Brend, pl. 96; Sims, no. 114). Jonayd’s picture is a masterpiece of color, design, and detail, but also of human sympathy. Figures are tall and slender, but relatively small in relation to the whole. Red dominates the scene in token of the wedding. The left half of the composition shows a chamber in the women’s quarters: Homāyun, dressed in red, lifts a bashful sleeve to her face as her wedding sheet is displayed. In the right half of the composition, which is narrower but drawn to imply greater depth, Homāy issues into the male area to receive salutations on the consummation of his marriage. The rich detail includes tilework, carpets, candles with low-hanging shades, and a celadon jar. It is not clear how many of the remaining eight paintings in the manuscript may be attributed to Jonayd, since a closely similar style is seen in a picture that clearly belonged to the original, but is now folio 20b in Bahrām Mirzā’s Album (Sims, no. 179): it is surmounted by a label in Safavid style, and presumably sanctioned by Dust-Moḥammad, bearing an attribution to ʿAbd-al-Ḥayy.

 

Bibliography:

Lawrence Binyon, James V. S. Wilkinson, and Basil Gray, Persian Miniature Painting, Oxford, 1933; repr. New York, 1971.

Barbara Brend, Islamic Art, London, 1991.

Eleanor Sims, Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources, New Haven and London, 2002.

Wheeler M. Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters, Leiden, 2001.

(Barbara Brend)

Originally Published: June 15, 2009

Last Updated: April 17, 2012

This article is available in print.
Vol. XV, Fasc. 1, p. 5