Mirza Kadym Irevani

Biography

In 1947 the art historian Natalya Miklashevskaya, going through the Persian lacquers in the Hermitage, opened a flat wooden case: a mirror was set into the right-hand side, on the left was a portrait of a man with the sitter’s name written in Russian cursive, and on the lid stood a French inscription saying that the piece had been made “for General Karvalin” and drawn by “a certain Kadym Bek”. That is how one of the Hermitage’s two works by Mirza Kadym Irevani, presented by a private owner back in 1936, turned up in the museum stores.

He liked to sign his pieces, and never dated them.

He was born in 1825 in Erivan (now Yerevan), then the capital of the Erivan Khanate, which Persia ceded to Russia three years later under the Treaty of Turkmenchay. He was the only son of a carpenter, Mamed-Huseyn; Miklashevskaya, who was the first to put the name in print in 1954, supposed that the father did ornamental woodcarving and taught the boy ornament himself. The father was able to send his son to the progymnasium in Tiflis. Back home at fifteen, Mirza Kadym entered the postal service and stayed in it for thirty-five years, to the end of his life; he died with the rank of collegiate assessor, and sometimes added that title to his signature beside the name “Mirza Kadym Irevani” or simply “Kadym Bek”. He had no training in art. By family tradition his first work in paint was a woman’s portrait on a mirror, done in his teens. He knew Russian, French and Persian, built up a library of Russian, Western and Eastern authors, loved music, and painted the walls of the room where he worked himself. The house has not survived.

His early pieces are craft: paper stencils for embroidery in silk and gold thread, a medallion in the shape of an eight-pointed star and a quarter-circle for the cover of a round tray, designs for wall paintings with flowers and birds, where a swallow settles on a rose and the pheasants are drawn so carefully that one can see how much he enjoyed doing it. For the wall paintings he drew in pencil, pricked the outline with a needle for pouncing and went over it once more with a brush. Two small pictures on glass, “Dancer” and “Dervish”, which look like popular prints, and a drawing of a man with a dagger belong to the same years.

In the early 1850s he was called to the decaying Palace of the Sardars of Erivan. Its paintings had been made in 1815 by a Persian master, Abd al-Raziq; in 1827 Russian artillery badly damaged the building during the siege, after the annexation to Russia the palace stood neglected, and only around 1850 was it decided to restore it. Mirza Kadym repainted the hall of mirrors and painted for the niches of the upper tier of the great hall four life-size portraits in oil on canvas, one metre by two: Fath-Ali Shah, Abbas Mirza, Hossein Khan Qajar and Rostam from the “Shahnameh”. The people shown on the walls had lived thirty or forty years before the painter, and he followed Abd al-Raziq’s old schemes; even so, these canvases are counted as the first easel paintings in Azerbaijani art. Preparatory drawings for them survive, of a warrior in armour and of Abbas Mirza, where one can already see the light and shade on the astrakhan hat, the meekly folded hands and the slight forward lean of the torso. Hands, Miklashevskaya remarks, always remained the painter’s weak point. The palace was demolished in 1914; the portraits were taken down from the walls and are now in Tbilisi, in the Art Museum of Georgia, and their authenticity is checked against the photographs of the interiors in Dmitry Yermakov’s album.

For the last fifteen years he painted mostly portraits in watercolour and tempera, often to commission: a seated woman leaning on a bolster, a young man against patterned cloth, Mah Talat in a tirma shawl (this miniature its owner sold to the Tbilisi museum as a “portrait of a Persian woman by an unknown nineteenth-century Iranian painter”, having destroyed the Russian signature and left only the Persian one). In the second half of the 1860s, from a reproduction in a Russian illustrated magazine, he painted Tsesarevich Alexander with his wife, surrounding the state portrait with a frame of plant ornament that looks like inlay. In his pictures the floor stands upright, the carpet is filled with even rows of identical “buta”, and depth does not come off; on the other hand the furniture foreshortens correctly, the faces are modelled with a barely visible stipple of pinkish brown and blue, and the folds of clothing are painted in a dense, free stroke. He worked in egg tempera, which is why the colours have held well. His last work, the unfinished “Rose and Nightingale”, shows the procedure itself: drawing, reddish-brown outline, underpainting in layers from the top down, stippled modelling of volume.

He died in 1875 in Erivan. His grave has not survived.

After his death more than a hundred of his works remained in the family. In 1921 the widow of his elder son, Fatma Khanum Kadymbekova, moved to Baku; the pictures and the library stayed in Erivan and soon disappeared. A little over twenty sheets were brought out, and in 1939 the Baku Museum of Arts bought them. By the middle of the twentieth century twenty-three authentic works by Irevani were known: twenty in Baku, two in the Hermitage, one in Tbilisi. The painter’s great-grandson Ismet Akhundov, born in Erivan in 1925, also became a painter.