Many of the exceptional and rare works of art on display at Christie’s Dubai have never before been seen in the United Arab Emirates.
The auction house’s upcoming sales, which include an auction of Islamic and Indian art, including oriental rugs and carpets in London on October 27, paintings from Christie’s Private Sales, the Old Masters Evening Sale on December 8, and British and European Art Part I on December 15, are all represented in the gallery’s most recent exhibition, which features a diverse collection of works from those sales.
Old masterworks like Sir Anthony van Dyck’s 1636 Portrait of Henrietta Maria and Theodore Gericault’s equestrian picture Etalon Anglo-Arabe coexist with an Ottoman Turkish Iznik Slipware ceramic jug from 1565 and Reza Abbasi’s exquisitely detailed 1620 miniature illustration A White-Eared Bulbul.
An extraordinarily rare and magnificent 17th century Royal Mughal Pashmina carpet from northern India, produced around 1650, is one of the exhibition’s centerpieces. The fifth emperor of the Mughal Empire, Shah Jahan I, oversaw the weaving of the mogul pashmina carpet.
The highly treasured pashmina wool used to make the Royal Mughal Pashmina carpet was imported from the mountains of Nepal, where goats were forced to graze in subzero temperatures, producing an exceptionally fine pashmina wool by nature. Given that each strand is only a sixth the width of a human hair, experienced weavers can weave more complicated patterns, adding shading, perspective, and other features to give the carpet a three-dimensional, painterly aspect.
Pages from one of the earliest examples of Quran production are another exceptional feature of the programme. The pages are composed of vellum paper, and the striking Kufic script is written all over them. Because it was used to transcribe the Quran for architectural embellishment, this specific kind of Arabic script rose to prominence early on.
Kufic is difficult to read because it lacks the dots and diacritical marks used in Arabic lettering. However, the bold, simple script is appealing because of its contemporary appearance and the way it is laid out on the page.
