Depictions of Fruit in the Tiles of Golestān Palace

Golestān Palace is the remnant of the historic citadel of Tehran, which dates back to the Safavid period, and the Zandiyeh and Fatḥ-Ali Shah Qajar. But because of extensive repairs by Nasser al-Din Shah in 1905, most of the buildings in this complex are regarded to be from the Nasseri era. Golestān Palace was the residence of the Qajar kings and the country’s administrative heart whose architectural decorations had formed in connection with traditional cultural concepts, as well as a mixture of traditional and western and fully western concepts. To decorate the palaces and government buildings in this era, some religious, national and traditional concepts, such as common tales, were used and building pictorial backgrounds using natural scenery, structures, depicting animals, plants, and inanimate objects became popular. Painting fruit was a new concept which appeared in the Haft Rang [seven colour] tiles used on the outside walls of the Golestān Palace. These tiles were painted with depictions of bunches of flowers, and fruit such as pomegranates, grapes, cucumbers, Persian melons, apples, pears, and watermelons. Given the importance of food among Iranians, the fruit paintings can be considered alongside the cultural and social changes during the Qajar era which have been reflected in travelogues and photographs remaining of that time; foreign tourists have mentioned the welcoming of guests by various types of food and fruit and have described the Iranian food spreads and their culinary traditions. The main question of this research is to do with the method of depicting fruit in the tiles of the Golestān Palace and the general aim of this article is understanding how the cultural evolution and changes in artistic depictions have been reflected in the Qajar era.  This research considers raw food to be a cultural element, and uses a descriptive-analytical approach, gathering information from libraries, making use of photographs, and travelogues related to the Qajar era. The history of depicting fruit in Iranian Architectural ornamentation is considered to go back to the Afshar era and the Indian masons which has remained as expanded decorative paintings. In the painted tiles of the Qajar era, fruit types appeared which have never been used as ornamentation before. For example, apart from the common fruit, vegetables and fruit such as cherries, sour-cherries, and corn were painted on the tiles of the Golestān Palace. The corn with large yellow kernels, and some red cherries have been depicted alongside other fruit. What is remarkable about the depiction of the fruit, is the ornamental arrangement of the fruit with leaves and flowers; most of the fruit are seen as individual or bunches in arrangements that includes a framework of leaves and flowers. The frames are not uniform and sometimes are accompanied by architectural elements such as pillars or sometimes with green vines and trestles of greenery. The fruit are depicted freely using different colour shading, colour bordering using lines, and cross hatching which has been copied form imported post cards and magazine pictures. Plants and fruit have had a legendary, symbolic and ritualistic place in the Iranian psyche since the ancient times; but, in the Qajar era, they have appeared in a realistic style and as one of the main concepts of depictions, rivalling the European still life paintings. The findings in this research show that, although the fruits depictions in the Golestān Palace are a continuation of the previous eras, but the cultural evolution of the Qajar era has had an effect on them and has changed a lot in relation to the Iranian culinary culture.