Basin with Figural Imagery

A scalloped brass basin, hammered up from a single blank and inlaid over its whole interior in silver and gold with musicians, courtiers, enthroned figures, polo players, and addorsed griffins - the standard cast of Ilkhanid courtly imagery, made for a patron the object itself never names. No maker's name survives, and no owner is documented between its manufacture in early fourteenth-century Iran and its appearance in the New York collection of Edward C. Moore, the silversmith who ran Tiffany and Co.'s design studio for more than two decades.

Moore left the basin, and roughly four hundred other objects from the Islamic world, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on his death in 1891 - still the largest single body of Islamic-world material the Museum has ever received in one gift. His wider collecting, drawn from Greece and Rome, Asia, Europe and the Islamic world alike, is documented to have directly shaped the silver Tiffany produced under his direction in the 1870s and 1880s. Nothing in the sources consulted ties this particular basin to any specific Tiffany design; the connection that is documented runs at the level of the collection as a whole, not this one object.

The piece has been in print continuously since 1930 and has not moved between departments, countries, or centuries in that time - a stability that is itself worth recording, since a Metropolitan sibling from the same 1891 bequest, catalogued as a candlestick, has had its own country and date revised by the Museum within the last decade.

A basin built for a hand, not a table

The object is a large, shallow hand basin, 20 1/2 inches (51.1 cm) across and only 5 1/8 inches (13 cm) high, raised from a single sheet of brass and finished with a distinctive scalloped, crenellated rim. Basins of this general kind are called tasht in Persian and lagan in Arabic, and large hand basins under those names are documented in the eastern Islamic world from the late twelfth century onward. This specific scalloped profile, however, appears to be a narrower phenomenon: the Metropolitan's own catalogue entry identifies it as a form produced under the Ilkhanid dynasty specifically, citing a closely comparable basin in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (no. 546-1905), datable to about 1300-1320.

A basin of this size and elaboration was not a plain washstand fixture. Paired historically with a matching ewer, it belonged to the furniture of hospitality and courtly ceremony - brought out for guests to rinse their hands before or after a meal, in a setting where the vessel itself was as much a display of the host's standing as the ritual it served.

How it was made

The body was raised - hammered up from a flat brass blank into its bowl shape - then engraved with the decorative scheme before the engraved recesses were inlaid with silver and gold, hammered gently into the carved indentations. This inlay technique, used across the piece's whole interior surface, was expensive and demanding, and the Metropolitan's own Heilbrunn Timeline essay on Ilkhanid courtly art singles out this basin's accession number when describing how such inlays were worked into bronze or brass. The same essay notes that on Ilkhanid inlaid metalwork generally, a large proportion of the original gold and silver has been lost over the centuries to wear and cleaning; whether that applies to this particular basin, whose Museum overview page describes an intricately inlaid surface without qualification, is not stated either way in the sources consulted, and is recorded below as an open question rather than resolved by inference.

Little survives about who actually did this work. The Museum's own essay on Ilkhanid courtly art states plainly that direct evidence of court sponsorship and named workshops is scarce, because few surviving objects of the period carry dedications or signatures, and proposes that the best metalworkers from two older centers - Mosul in northern Iraq and Shiraz in southern Iran, both established seats of the inlaid-brass tradition before the Mongol conquest - relocated to the new Ilkhanid capital at Tabriz to work for the court. No inscription or record ties this basin to Tabriz, Mosul, or Shiraz specifically; the proposal is offered by the Museum as context for the type, not as a documented fact about this object.

What is pictured on it

The decoration, organized in concentric bands radiating from a central sun-shaped medallion, covers the whole interior. Reading outward, the registers hold servants; seated musicians playing instruments; courtiers and attendants; and five enthroned figures flanked by hunters and polo players, a motif that recurs twice - once on the basin's base and once on its wall. Around the crenellated border are birds, and worked into the spaces created by an underlying geometric grid are addorsed griffins, human-headed winged animals, and tall flowering plants.

Francesca Leoni, writing the Museum's own catalogue entry, identifies this imagery collectively as the princely cycle - a standard repertoire of scenes illustrating royal life and pastimes that recurs across inlaid Ilkhanid-period brasses and ceramics made for aristocratic patrons. She distinguishes two ways this repertoire could be used: in a small number of cases, decoration was drawn directly from a specific literary text, as on the comparable Victoria and Albert basin, whose scenes illustrate the story of Bahram Gur as told in both Firdausi's Shahnama and Nizami's Khamsa. In most instances, Leoni writes, the decoration instead combines standardized formulas - enthronement scenes, musical entertainment, outdoor pursuits - without illustrating a single named story, and she places this basin in that second, generic group rather than reading it as an illustration of a specific narrative. On the strength of the subject matter, the quality of the drawing, and the choice of costly materials, she argues that the basin was probably produced in a royal workshop; that conclusion is an argued reading in a citable, named publication, not a documented fact established by any mark on the object itself.

The imagery is a useful corrective to the common shorthand that Islamic art avoids figural representation. That avoidance applied most consistently to religious contexts - mosques, Qurans, devotional objects - and did not extend with the same force to secular courtly luxury goods. Figural imagery tied to kingship and courtly life is documented across Ilkhanid metalwork and ceramics of exactly this kind, produced for exactly this kind of patron, and this basin's crowded registers of musicians, hunters, and enthroned rulers are a standard example of that secular figural tradition rather than an anomaly within it.

The attribution and how stable it has been

The Museum's published references have called this basin Persian or Iranian consistently since the earliest reference located, Maurice Dimand's 1930 Handbook of Muhammedan Decorative Arts, through Arthur Upham Pope's 1930 Introduction to Persian Art, the 1931 Burlington House Persian Art exhibition catalogue, Dimand's revised 1944 Handbook of Muhammadan Art, Umberto Scerrato's 1966 Metalli islamici, the Museum's own 1970 Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries, Stuart Cary Welch's 1987 volume on the Islamic World, Linda Komaroff's 1992 study The Golden Disk of Heaven, and the current entry in the 2011 Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art. Across eight decades and at least nine separate publications, the country and dynasty assigned to the piece have not moved.

That stability is worth stating plainly because it is not universal even within this same bequest. A tripod candlestick from the same 1891 Edward C. Moore gift, accession 91.1.572, was exhibited in 1981-82 as Egyptian work of the first half of the fourteenth century and has since been redated by the Museum's current cataloguing to the second half of the thirteenth century and reattributed to Syria or northern Iraq, on stylistic grounds. No comparable revision has been published for this basin. A record that only reported the present attribution without checking for a reattribution history would not be able to say that; checking both pieces from the same bequest side by side is what makes the comparison possible.

Edward C. Moore

Edward Chandler Moore was born in New York City on August 30, 1827, and died at his summer residence in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, on August 2, 1891. He trained in his father John Chandler Moore's silversmithing shop, became a partner in John C. Moore and Son in 1849, and took over the family firm when his father retired. Tiffany, Young and Ellis - the firm that became Tiffany and Co. - secured exclusive retail rights to Moore's silver in 1851, and in 1868 Moore's manufactory was transferred into Tiffany and Co. itself in exchange for cash and shares in the newly incorporated company. He served as the firm's chief silver designer and artistic director from then until his death, and his work for Tiffany won a gold medal at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, a medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, a special gold medal in Paris in 1878, and the Legion of Honor in 1889.

Alongside his design work, Moore assembled a personal collection of more than two thousand objects spanning ancient Greece and Rome, the Islamic world, East Asia, and Europe, acquired through private sales, public auctions in Paris and London, world's fairs, and relationships with dealers including Siegfried Bing and Samuel P. Avery. He set up a design room at Tiffany where this collection and an extensive library were made available to the firm's apprentices and craftsmen, with the explicit purpose, as The Studio reported in 1891, of supplying design standards for American industrial art. His approximately four hundred Islamic-world objects - ceramics, glass, textiles, jewelry and metalwork spanning the 1100s to the 1800s and Spain to India - remain, in the Museum's own words, the largest and most comprehensive collection of that material ever to enter the Metropolitan in a single gift.

How the collection shaped Tiffany's silver

The influence of Moore's Islamic holdings on Tiffany's output in the 1870s and 1880s is documented at the level of the collection and the firm's design vocabulary, not as a claim tied to any single object. Tiffany's own company records from the period describe lines of work as "Moresque," "Persian," and "Saracenic," and the Museum's own account of the collection states that the mixed-metal wares Moore acquired inspired Tiffany's experiments with what the firm called chromatically decorated silver - pieces inlaid with reddish copper and black niello - while the firm's enameling successes recall the colorful enameled glass and Iznik ceramics also in his collection. A silver pitcher of about 1874-75, accented with a cast elephant head, is cited by the Museum specifically as an example of Tiffany's engagement with Islamic and Indian sources.

Nothing in the sources consulted for this record connects this basin, individually, to any specific piece of Tiffany silver. That is stated here deliberately rather than left implied: the documented influence is broad and collection-wide, resting on the mixed-metal and enameled wares as a class, and extending a documented, collection-level fact to one particular object without a source that makes that specific link would be exactly the kind of invented connection this record exists to avoid.

The 1891 bequest and what happened to it

On Moore's death his family gave more than two thousand objects and five hundred books to the Metropolitan Museum. Before this gift, a Museum visitor interested in art from the Islamic world would have found little of relevance on display; Islamic-period objects the Museum already held were shown scattered among unrelated material, described by material rather than by culture. Moore's bequest was one of the first individual collections whose donors required their gifts to be shown together, and it gave the Museum, for the first time, a space in which a visitor could see Islamic-world woodwork, glass, and metalwork unified and labeled as such. The collection was displayed as a single unit until 1942, after which it was dispersed to the specialized curatorial departments that had grown up around it in the intervening decades - among them Islamic Art, where this basin is now held.

Curator Maurice Dimand, who built the Museum's Near Eastern department from 1923 until his retirement in 1959, drew heavily on the Moore collection for his 1930 Handbook of Muhammedan Decorative Arts and its 1944 revision - the works in which this basin first appears in print. No source consulted for this record documents any contemporary or later controversy specifically over the Moore bequest's entry into the Museum; the pattern that does emerge is the ordinary one of a Gilded Age industrial collector's holdings gradually being absorbed into, and helping to define, a new academic department. In 2024 the Museum mounted an exhibition, Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany and Co. (June 9-October 20, 2024, Gallery 199), reuniting more than 180 objects from Moore's collection alongside seventy pieces of Tiffany silver made under his direction. This basin does not appear among the objects listed for that exhibition in the sources consulted, and this record does not claim it was shown there.

Provenance before Moore: a gap, not a chain

The Metropolitan's own published provenance for this object begins and ends with one name: Edward C. Moore, American, New York, until his death in 1891, when the piece was bequeathed to the Museum. No earlier owner, dealer, or country of export is recorded in the Museum's provenance field or in any other source consulted for this record.

How the basin left Iran, when, through whose hands, and by what route it reached New York by 1891 at the latest is simply not documented anywhere this research reached. General accounts of Moore's collecting describe purchases at auctions in Paris and London, at world's fairs, and through dealers such as Siegfried Bing and Samuel P. Avery - but none of those general accounts names this basin specifically, and attaching one of those routes to this object without a source that does so would be an invented provenance link of exactly the kind this record's house rules forbid. The gap is recorded as a gap.

Two basins and a candlestick: what else Moore kept

This was not an isolated purchase within a single-example collection. The same 1891 bequest also included a second basin of comparable date, catalogued by the Museum as Basin with Zodiac Signs and Royal Titles (accession 91.1.553, late 13th-early 14th century), and a third, later basin from a different Islamic dynasty and region, the Ablutions Basin of Yemeni Sultan al-Mujahid Sayf al-Din 'Ali (accession 91.1.589, ca. 1321-63), made for a named Rasulid ruler of Yemen. It also included a tripod candlestick, accession 91.1.572, from the Syrian or northern Iraqi metalworking tradition, discussed above for its own reattribution history. Reading this basin alongside those pieces shows a collector with a sustained, comparative interest in inlaid metalwork of this specific form and period, not a single souvenir purchase - a pattern consistent with the design-reference purpose the Museum's own account gives for Moore's collecting as a whole.

Publication and exhibition history

The basin has been shown publicly at least three times since entering the Museum: in London, at the Royal Academy's International Exhibition of Persian Art at Burlington House, January 7-February 28, 1931 (catalogue no. 222D); in New York, in the Metropolitan's own Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries, November 14, 1970-June 1, 1971 (no. 165); and in New York again, in The Nature of Islamic Ornament, Part III: Geometric Patterns, March 17-July 18, 1999, an exhibition mounted without a printed catalogue. It has been reproduced or discussed in print in at least nine publications between 1930 and 2011, listed above under attribution history, giving it a continuous eighty-year documentary record independent of any single scholar's reading.