Reza Abbasi

Around 1600, Shah Abbas I was rebuilding Isfahan into one of the grandest cities in the world, and in his royal workshop the finest painter was a man the shah honoured with his own name. Reza had trained under his father, a court artist, and around 1603 he received the title Abbasi from the ruler himself.

His work broke with two centuries of habit. Persian painters had filled dense pages illustrating epics and poems. Reza Abbasi turned instead to single figures on single sheets, made for the albums, or muraqqa, that a collector could leaf through. A languid young man in a turban, a seated dervish, a pair of lovers, all drawn with a flowing ink line that swells and thins to suggest a whole body under the cloth.

He is usually called the last great master of the Persian miniature. He died in 1635, and a museum in Tehran built to hold Iranian art still carries his name.