English: A rare Safavid oil painting of an African soldier, Persia, Isfahan, circa 1680-90. 122 x 79.5 cm.

Bonhams have the privilege of presenting an enigmatic and unique painting depicting a flamboyant African soldier in Safavid Persia. Immensely rare, the present work is quite likely to be one of the first ever depictions of an African subject in Persian oil painting, and one of the earliest artistic records of the black African community whose descendants continue to reside in the Gulf region.

While the painting is – as Eleanor Sims argues below – a type, and one playing on variations in Safavid fashion, it must surely refer ultimately to a real-life soldier, a musketeer or tofangchi, a division of the Persian army primarily composed of foreign mercenaries. A figure (albeit one with white skin) which appears in the Kaempfner Album (produced in Isfahan in 1684-85) in the British Museum is highly reminiscent of our subject, in pose, weaponry and dress: the hat with its plume, the two straps which pass over his shoulders (to a backpack?), the accoutrements around his waist, the red-orange breeches, and the white banded gaiters. The British Museum catalogue describes him as a royal bodyguard.

Leaving aside western Europeans, most foreigners in Safavid Persia, whether free or slaves, were closer to home – they were from the Caucasus, Georgia, Circassia, or notably, Armenian, in the flourishing town of New Julfa. But an African must have been in a minority, by geographical accident (and less common than in Ottoman Turkey, where black Africans, often eunuchs, were more commonly in positions of power at court). Our figure demonstrates his confidence in his rank and profession, his dress and (to some degree, at least) his wealth, create a well-to-do image, almost dandyish.

Whether he was a slave, who had come to Persia via the Arab trade from East Africa and the Indian Ocean into the Gulf (whose descendants to this day form an Afro-Iranian community in the south of the country); whether he had been freed as a condition of service in the Persian army; whether he was a free man who had ended up in the melting-pot of 17th Century Isfahan; or whether he is strictly a 'type', perhaps made African to cater to an existing European interest in blackamoors, and other signifiers of 'the exotic' (especially if he had a female companion painting, as Sims suggests) - we will doubtless never know. What does seem to be clear is that this painting is a rare, perhaps unique portrayal of an African in the Safavid army, and of an African in Persia.

One more shared feature offers at least a sense of his sources: the stiff golden frogging above the waist. It is remarkably similar to the stiff golden frogging on the red brocaded robes worn by the two ladies of the 'Tehran Suite' figures (Sims, op. cit. (1976), pp. 242-44). Such an unimportant but notable similarity, in addition to the details of the youths' hats and shoes and poses, as well as the composition and content of the landscapes in which all four figures are placed, suggest that the anonymous painter of the 'African Youth' was acquainted with the work of the anonymous painter of the 'Tehran Suite'. He may even have been local to Isfahan, to judge by the pigeon-tower he puts into the background. Perhaps he presented his 'African Youth' in such unusual garb because Africans were so unusually encountered in the late 17th century, even in cosmopolitan and Safavid Isfahan?

The African youth smiles gently; he is red-lipped, unbearded, and very dark-skinned. Did he ever have a female companion, as the genre, and most of the other 21 paintings presently recorded, suggest would have been the case? She would surely also have been very young, black and beautiful, standing in a similar landscape, smilingly facing the youth; and she would have been garbed in some equally fanciful interpretation of the dress of a Safavid Persian lady—Persian, Armenian, or Georgian. We shall probably never know for certain, hypothesize as we might. For now, let us simply say that the 'African Youth in Persian Garb' is an astonishingly unusual and exotic later 17th-century Persian vision of a person from 'parts unknown'.