Persian Pictures

This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell''s first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, ''Persian Pictures'' is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia''s heroic, complex, mythical past and its present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly ''secret, mysterious life of the East'', the lives of its women, its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell''s documentation of Muharram – the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. ''Persian Pictures'' is both travelogue and meditation, an elegiac and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.