Persian Qajar Molded Relief Tile | Falconer on a White Horse

A falconer rides out across a cobalt ground, his hooded bird perched on a gauntleted fist, in this large molded and polychrome-glazed earthenware tile. The rider wears a plumed turban and a spotted robe; his white horse, bridled and caparisoned in a lattice-patterned saddlecloth, steps through a field of turquoise-leaved rosettes and lotus blossoms.

Two domed, cross-topped chapels and rows of purple hills fill the background, and a molded upper border carries confronted birds among flowering scrolls. Mounted in a custom wooden box frame. Molded relief tiles of this kind belong to a long Persian tradition of figural architectural revetment, worked in a soft earthenware body under a thick alkaline glaze in cobalt, turquoise, manganese purple, and white. The falconer is one of the standard courtly subjects, alongside the hunt, the polo match, and the garden gathering, and it descends from the princely imagery of Safavid painting into the more theatrical relief tilework of the later period.

Their conical drums, cross finials, and hillside setting point to Armenian Christian architecture, and their inclusion suggests a workshop or patron in one of the mixed communities of the Persian northwest or the Armenian quarter of New Julfa at Isfahan, where Christian subjects and motifs entered the local decorative vocabulary.