Derviscio

When Mirza Gadim Iravani painted this wandering holy man around 1850, easel painting was only just arriving in Azerbaijan, and you can see him working with one foot in an older world. He trained in the tradition of Persian and eastern manuscript miniatures, and it shows in how the figure stands. The torso faces you directly, the head turns to three-quarters, and the legs are set in flat profile, the way figures were arranged on a painted page for centuries. He worked the image in oil on glass, against a plain green ground that flattens the space around the dervish. For years the museum in Baku had this catalogued simply as “Man”; only later was it recognised as one of Iravani’s dervishes.