Masters of the cartoon

Abbas Karbasioun was born in Isfahan in 1922, in the Chahar Souq quarter. His father and grandfather were builders of the city. He left school after the sixth year and went to learn the art of drawing, first under Haj Mosavvar-ol-Molki and then under Ahmad Archang. By the age of eighteen he was working on his own, designing for both the carpet loom and the tile kiln.

His gift was for the eslimi and the khatai, the arabesque and the floral scroll. He followed the traditional patterns of Isfahan and drew them at a scale few others could manage. He said once that he had no teacher but the Naqsh-e Jahan square itself, that his only book was the mosque of Sheikh Lotfollah and the Ali Qapu beside it, and that the true master of every Isfahan designer was Reza Abbasi. His finest carpet designs went to the looms of the city, and his tilework went further still. His patterns cover the walls of the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, the Shrine of Zeinab in Damascus, the shrines of Karbala, and the Goharshad Mosque. The tile-maker Ali Panjeh-pour, for whom he drew many of these works, called him a prodigy and the reviver of tile design in his age.

He trained a number of the carpet and tile designers who followed him in Isfahan. He died on 30 May 1992, at the age of seventy, and is buried in the Bagh-e Rezvan cemetery.

Abdolhamid Sanat Negar was born in Kerman in 1908. He went as a boy of twelve to Mashhad with his father, and there he is remembered as a designer who bridged the two traditions, the Kerman in which he learned and the Khorasan in which much of his work was woven. He belongs to the era of the great palace commissions, when the workshops of the north-east drew the largest and finest carpets of the age for the houses of state.

He is associated with the monumental carpets of the period, very large pieces drawn for the Marble Palace and for the Parliament, and his designs are tied to the celebrated Amoghli workshop of Mashhad, whose carpets are held today in the collection of the Niavaran Palace. Several of his compositions are remembered by name, among them the Kouzeh Kanani, the Shakh-e Shekasteh, and a Takht-e Jamshid drawn from the reliefs of Persepolis. He worked in the manner of the Kerman cartoon, the fine floral field and the medallion, carried onto a scale few designers attempted.

Ahmad Archang was born in Isfahan in 1914. He came to the cartoon young. From the age of twelve he was drawing designs for rugs, learning the trade in the workshops of the city. He had no single celebrated master. Among those who encouraged him early was Gholamhossein Eslimi, an arabesque artist who brought him to the workshops of Bagh-e Melli to colour the designs of the plaster-painter Nasrollah Rafaeil. It was Isfahan itself that taught him, the tilework and the painted halls and the great square at its heart, and he gave his life to setting that inheritance down on paper.

His work is a return to the Safavid manner, the classical tradition revived in the Isfahan of his own day. He drew arabesque and khatai, the scrolling vine and the split-leaf, with a confidence that set his hand apart. The flowers and leaves carry an imagination that other designers did not reach, and a rug bearing his name was understood to stand above its neighbours. The great medallion-and-corner compositions he drew became the most copied designs in the city, though the originals woven from his own cartoons remain the finest of them.

For much of his life he worked with the Seirafian house, the long collaboration that produced many of the most admired Isfahan carpets of the twentieth century. He died in the spring of 1990. His cartoons are still on the looms of Isfahan, and his name still raises the standing of any carpet that carries it.

Akbar Mahdiei was born in Isfahan in 1954. His family were not carpet people. His father was a gold-thread weaver, and the boy came to the loom on his own, beginning to learn carpet painting at the age of eleven. He entered the Isfahan School of Fine Arts in 1969, where he studied under Jazizadeh and Javad Rostam Shirazi, and chose the miniature as his discipline. He left after two years to earn a living, and was sent to the workshop of Rahmatollah Shadman, where he served until 1975.

From the mid-1970s he began producing carpets of his own. His designs are known for their colour and their closeness to nature. He drew the Golfarang, the rose and the bird upon the branch, and pictorial scenes drawn from verse and myth, in a palette more vivid than most Isfahan work of his generation. He won the award for best carpet designer in 2001, and registered his work under his own name, a step that set him apart in a craft where designers had long worked unnamed for the workshop houses. His carpets are held in museum collections in Iran and abroad, among them the Astan Quds Razavi Museum in Mashhad.

He worked for more than fifty years from his gallery in Isfahan, with his sons beside him. He died in January 2025, at the age of seventy.

Eisa Bahadori was born in 1906 in a village near Arak, in the central province of Iran. He went young to Tehran and studied at the school of Kamal-ol-Molk, the foremost training a painter could have in that day. He was a painter first, at home in the realistic manner and in the older miniature both, and the painter’s learning stayed with him when he turned to the loom.

It was Isfahan that drew him. He went there to study the tilework and the wall paintings of the old buildings, copying the designs of the historic halls hour after hour, and in 1936 he was made director of the city’s School of Fine Arts. He held the post for many years and built the school into one of the chief places for the keeping and revival of the Persian arts. Among the students who passed through his teaching were Mahmoud Farshchian and Javad Rostam Shirazi, names that would carry the Isfahan school forward.

His own gift was for the cartoon. He brought to the carpet a learning in philosophy and in the old myths, and he was the first to set the portrait and the pictorial tableau on the loom in earnest. His tableau rugs were woven in the Haghighi workshop, among them the carpet known as the Humanity Carpet, a symbolic composition that reads the stages of a human life, childhood and youth and age, around a central medallion. He drew designs that crossed the usual bounds of the Persian rug, a prayer field with a starfish at its heart in place of the medallion, sea creatures where the flowers would be. He was honoured at home and abroad, with a gold medal at the Brussels world fair and a French decoration for the arts.

Late in life he left Iran for France, to live near his daughter. He died in Paris in 1986 and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. His designs remain among the foundations of the modern Isfahan school.

Mohammad Hossein Mosavvar-ol-Molki, known as Haj Hossein, was born in Isfahan in 1890, into a family of painters whose line ran back to the Safavid age. He learned the first of his art from his father, and after his father’s death turned to the painting of pen cases to make his living. He was a painter before he was a carpet designer, and the painter’s eye never left his work. He was a master of the classical miniature, schooled in the manner of the old Isfahan painters.

In his middle years he travelled to Paris, hoping to set Persian painting beside the painting of the West. There he met the scholar Arthur Upham Pope, and from that meeting came a set of drawings of the flowering motifs of the finest Iranian carpets, prepared for one of Pope’s books. He returned home after some months and turned to design. He was skilled across many arts at once. He painted, he worked in tash’ir, he drew for the coffee-house wall, but it is the carpet that carries his name furthest.

He is the designer of the great pictorial compositions of Isfahan, the Shekargah, the hunting scene alive with horsemen and game, and the Gol-o-bolbol, the garden of flowers and nightingales. These were woven most famously in the Seirafian workshop, and some by the Haghighi house. He died in 1977, and his house in Isfahan is now a museum. The hunting carpets of Isfahan, wherever they are woven, descend from his pen.

Hassan Khan Shahrokhi was born in Kerman around 1862, the son and pupil of Mohsen Khan, the head of the whole line of Kerman carpet painters. From his father he took the art of the cartoon and the method of laying a design onto the graphed ground point by point, and he carried it further than any of his generation. He was called the second teacher of Kerman design, the man through whom the craft passed to the century that followed.

He brought the figure and the story onto the Kerman loom. He drew the pictorial and the narrative, scenes of history and legend set within the fine floral field for which the city was known, and his designs carried a delicacy that placed Kerman beside the greatest weaving centres of Iran. His most celebrated work is a great pictorial carpet that gathers the kings of Iran across its field, more than a hundred of them, with the faces of world figures set among them, a feat of drawing few designers would attempt. One of his carpets is held in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, designed by him and woven by the master Ali Kermani, for the designer and the weaver were two different masters in the Kerman of his day.

He trained a generation of designers, among them his own sons, and the Shahrokhi name became a small dynasty of the cartoon in Kerman. He died in 1940, and the Kerman pictorial carpet carries his influence into the century that followed. His work and the wider story of the city are traced in our history of Kerman carpet weaving.

Hossein Taherzadeh Behzad was born in Tabriz in 1887. He trained for three years at the Fine Arts School in Tiflis, then went on to Istanbul, where he graduated first in his class at the academy that is now the Mimar Sinan University. He was a painter and a scholar of the old arts, and more than any single designer of his age he built the house in which modern Iranian carpet design would be taught. He gave his life not only to the drawing of cartoons but to the institution, the school, and the training of the men who came after him.

He directed the design work of the national Carpet Institute, and in 1930 he founded the School of Traditional Arts, the body through which the discipline of design passed to a new generation. Among those who learned in his orbit were the masters who would carry Tabriz and Tehran design through the middle of the century. He worked for a time at the Topkapi in Istanbul, where he gave his hand to the restoration of a great number of old manuscripts, and he drew the grand compositions of the national style for the palaces of his day.

He died in 1962. The system by which Iranian carpet design is taught, the school and the institute both, stands in large part on the work he did.

Javad Rostam Shirazi was born in 1919 in the Mahalleh-ye Now, the New Quarter of Isfahan. He came up in the first years of the city’s School of Fine Arts, entering as a student and going on to teach there, and he stands among the first generation of designers the school produced. He studied further at the College of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran, under Ali Mohammad Heydarian and others, and so joined the formal learning of the Tehran school to the older drawing of Isfahan.

His reach went beyond Iran. For a time he drew patterns for a royal carpet works abroad, and he returned home to work under the Ministry of Culture and Art. He exhibited internationally, and showed alongside the great miniaturist Hossein Behzad at the Brussels world fair, where his work was given a gold medal. He was set the drawing of a carpet for the National Council of Iran, the Baharestan, a great square of some eleven metres that took him two years to set down. In his later years the state honoured him with a first-degree art medal.

He was reckoned among the first-rate designers of Isfahan, and in miniature and illumination he was held one of the best the city had. He favoured the dense arabesque, the full cluster, the round many-petalled flower and the grape-leaf. His cartoons were woven above all in the houses of Haghighi and Seirafian. He died in 2005, his designs still among the patterns the looms of Isfahan return to.

Seyyed Hossein Arjangi, known across the trade as Mir Mosavvar, was born in Tabriz in 1881, into a family of painters whose line ran back to Aqa Mirak of the Safavid court. His father, Ebrahim Mir, was court painter to Mozaffar al-Din Shah and had studied the European manner in Tiflis and Moscow. Two of Ebrahim’s sons followed him, Hossein the carpet painter, called Mir Mosavvar, and Abbas the painter and caricaturist, called Rassam.

Mir Mosavvar drew from the age of ten. As a young man he went to Tiflis and to the academy in Moscow to learn oil and watercolour and the black-pen line, and travelled on to Paris and Italy to meet the art of Europe at first hand. He returned a classical Persian painter who understood the modern, and he was among the founders of the School of Decorative Arts in Tabriz. His carpet work ran to historical scenes and the faces of national figures, the great pictorial tableaux for which Tabriz became known, and his best-known carpet is the “Four Seasons.” The poet Nima Yushij, who knew the brothers, praised their painting in his letters as a new and masterly turn in Iranian art. He died in 1963.

Mirza Agha Emami was born in Isfahan in 1881, the son of the painter Mohammad Hosayni Emami, known for his flower-and-bird work. He grew up among the ruined and standing works of the Safavid city, and his long study of them gave him his enthusiasm for the old arts. His father set a condition on the boy’s wish to draw, that he give half his day to religion and half to the pen. Drawing and miniature were not a respected trade in the last years of the Qajar age, so to spare those around him he studied and practised in private.

With other artists of the city he set out first to revive sukht, the embossed and inlaid leather of fine book covers, an art that asked for command of the whole range of the painter’s craft at once, miniature and illumination, calligraphy and gilding, the working of leather and the adornment of the frame. When the painted cover of the Qajar age left little room for it, he did not give up the form but turned it to framed tableaux. He was sure in portraiture, in animals, in flower and bird and flowering shrub, and in the drawing of cartoons.

His care for the carpet drew him on until he established an atelier of his own and gave himself to the bettering of the cartoon and the making of very fine designs. He was among the small circle of painters whose drawings raised Isfahan weaving to the level of the miniature. His cartoons were carried to the foremost workshops of the city, the Shureshi house and that of Haj Mehdi Khan Safdarzadeh Haghighi among them, and he produced carpets of his own as well. He never signed his work. He taught the young Mahmoud Farshchian the first grounds of composition and the brush. He died in his city of birth in 1955, in his seventy-fifth year.

Because he left no signature, an Emami carpet is known instead by its making, and those who know his work hold certain things to be true. The foundation comes first: his carpets are believed to be laid always on a cotton warp, never silk. The ground is most often a straw-cream, a golden wheaten tone, especially the larger pieces; a lacquer-red ground he used only rarely. The borders run to lacquer-red and a deep navy. And the work holds to a small set of sizes, each a loom-width at a consistent fineness: a qālicheh (small carpet) of about a hundred and seventy centimetres, a two-by-three of about two hundred and ten, and a three-by-four of about three hundred and twenty, the largest near fourteen square metres.

Mirza Nasrollah Khan Naqqashzadeh was born in Kashan around 1896. His father, Mirza Ahmad Naqqash, was a carpet designer and painter of the city, and Nasrollah learned the art of the cartoon at home before entering the workshops. He married into the family of Seyyed Reza Khan Sanei, the most celebrated designer Kashan has produced, and the two worked side by side for many years as friends, colleagues, and relatives.

Sanei was fast and inventive, drawn to portraiture and landscape. Naqqashzadeh was his complement. He worked in the classical tradition and did not draw from life. What he brought was a discipline of drawing that contemporaries described as scientific and fundamental, a precision in setting out traditional patterns that had not existed in Kashan before him. In his designs, it was said, not the smallest asymmetry or disproportion could be seen. The Lachak-Toranj Afshan, one of the most recognised compositions in Kashan weaving, is attributed to his pen, and his cartoons are still put on the loom today. His designs reached beyond Kashan, among them work woven by the Isfahan master Haj Mehdi Khan Safdarzadeh Haghighi.

He left no children of his own. The line he helped define carried on through the Sanei family to which he was joined by marriage, among them the designer Seyyed Ali Sanei, the son of his wife’s family. He died around 1980, in his eighty-fifth year.

Seyyed Reza Khan Sanei was born in Kashan in 1886, to a family of the city’s Sayyids. By the accounts of those who knew him he was a man of wide learning, a calligrapher and musician as well as a designer, but it was to the carpet that he gave his greatest attention, and he became one of the most celebrated designers Kashan has produced.

His genius was speed and invention. Where other designers laboured over classical symmetry, Sanei drew with such confidence that contemporaries noted he never used an eraser. He broke the bounds of the traditional Kashan floral vocabulary. He is credited with bringing portrait weaving to the city, setting the faces of historical and political figures on the loom, and his landscapes drawn from Iranian proverbs are held in museum collections today. To manage the complexity of these new pictorial works, he brought the use of graph paper to the Kashan workshops, and a new discipline to the craft with it. His work was so distinct that his patterns became known simply as the Khan designs.

He lived to a great age. For decades he worked beside his son-in-law, Mirza Nasrollah Naqqashzadeh, and the two men stood as the twin pillars of Kashan design. Sanei was the swift innovator, Naqqashzadeh the classical perfectionist. He died around 1986, and is buried in the Dasht-e Afrouz cemetery of Kashan.