Persian Pictures: From the Mountains to the Sea

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 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 travelog and meditation, an elegaic and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.