A New Manuscript of Ali Riza Abbasi

The famous Persian painter of the first half of the 17th century, Ali Riza Abbasi, is well known as a miniaturist in his native country and in Europe. That is very natural because a great quantity of his miniatures and drawings have been preserved until our time. For this reason, we have in European technical literature many works dealing with his painting.' But Ali Riza's ability as a calligrapher, celebrated in his time, is less known to us in consequence of the rarity of the manuscripts written by his hand. Of complete manuscripts we have only three, which are in the Russian Public Library at Petersburg (Dorn, Catalogue, p. 290, N 302; Dorn, Melanges Asiatiques, VI, pp. 97 and 103, Nos. 3 and 18) and one separate sheet in the British Museum (Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, Vol. 2, p. 782, Add. 23609). I am very happy to call attention to a fourth manuscript book by our calligrapher, which is in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This manuscript contains the Mesnevi (poem) and of Vahshi, a mediocre Persian poet of the 16th century. He was born in Bafik, Kirman, spent nearly the whole of his life in Yazd, and died there about 1583 A. D. His love-story of and is an imitation of Nizami's poem Khosraw and and is written in the same metre, hazaf. Ferhad and Shirin was left unfinished by the author (Rieu, op. cit. Vol. 2, p. 663). Manuscript copies of this work are not uncommon; for instance, the British Museum possesses five (Or. 318, Or. 326, Add. 6634, Add. 7721, Suppl. 308; see Rieu, Catalogue), and in other European libraries there are many others. Moreover, this poem has been lithographed twice in Teheran (A. H. 1263 and 1275=ZA. D. 1847 and 1858), once in Calcutta (A. H. 1249= A. D. 1833) and twice in Bombay (A. :E. 1274 and 1312

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