e easy and
excusable to go wrong; for from the local colour and the head of the man
who leads the horse it would seem to have been painted in India. We know
that the album from which it comes was for many years in that country;
yet I cannot believe that this picture is the product of any
Indo-Persian school. It is too good: there persists too much of the
great Timourid and Mongol tradition which, as the work of Sultan Mohamed
shows, was still cherished by the Persian artists of the sixteenth
century. That it is earlier than the seventeenth century and the reign
of Shah Abbas is beyond dispute; it is untainted, or almost untainted,
with that soft, slick, convictionless woolliness that was brought to
perfection by Riza Abbassi, the court painter, and seems to have
flattered so happily the taste of the Persian _grand monarque_. The
figure of the kneeling princess comes nearer to the style of Mirek than
to that of any other artist with whom I am acquainted; and, if I must
hazard a guess, I will suggest that this is the work of some Persian
pupil of Mirek who went to try his luck at the court of the Great Mogul.

With Shah Abbas and the seventeenth century Persian art becomes
definitely and hopelessly second-rate. From the ruins emerge a variety
of decadent schools of which two deserve mention. The academic school
continued the Behzad tradition, and its hard but capable style did well
enough for copying Persian old masters, European paintings by such
artists as Bellini, and engravings by such artisans as Marcantonio--an
amusing product of this last kind of activity (also from a book in Mr.
Ruck's possession) will be reproduced later in the _Burlington
Magazine_. At the same time there appeared a freer and softer style,
examples of which, at first sight, sometimes remind one of a
particularly good Conder. In India developed a number of schools,
romantic, picturesque, and literal; of these, a queer sensual charm
notwithstanding, it must be confessed that the two main characteristics
are weakness of design and a sweetly sugary colour. But I am straying
beyond any boundary that my illustrations could justify. I have been
able to give excellent examples of the late middle period of Persian
painting. In the two first we caught an echo of the great Timourid age
and felt a premonition of the good Sefevaean: in the last we see how
splendid Persian painting could be in its decline. I wish I could have
reproduced examples to show how g