Tryst in the Garden

Beneath a flowering almond, behind a carved golden parapet, the shahzade has bent towards his Beloved — and in this bending are two movements of different time. One of his hands already rests on her foot: an intimacy that has come to pass. The other reaches towards her face, stilled in the air a hair's breadth from her chin — an intimacy that is still unfolding. The body outpaces the heart; the road to living feeling is always longer than the road to being near. At their feet a dastarkhan is spread, and on it — pomegranates. A pomegranate is not opened with a knife: it ripens and bursts of itself, from within, when its time comes. So too the heart — it cannot be opened by force from without; one can only wait until it ripens to its own cracking. Below, by the stream — a girl with a barbat in her hands and a youth with a cup: the world of sensual joy, of music and fruit. The stream separates it from the dais where the couple sits — the border between the pleasure of the garden and the stillness of a feeling not yet fulfilled. The almond in blossom above their heads has already given all it could give this spring; the mountain behind it stands motionless, like that which does not change while all around is changing. The artist devoted seven months of labour to this scene with a brush of a single hair — stitch by stitch, petal by petal, waiting for the garden to emerge on the paper as slowly as the feeling between the two figures. About the work The miniature is executed in the tradition of the court painting of Maverannahr of the 16th–17th centuries, where scenes of garden trysts were an enduring subject of palace poetry and book illustration. The conventional perspective, the golden ground and the tiered construction of the composition — the figures on the dais, the servants below, the garden and mountains in the far distance — are characteristic of the Bukhara school of miniature of this period. The subject of lovers meeting in a blossoming garden echoes the imagery of the Sufi poetic tradition, where the garden often serves as a metaphor for the inner state of the soul. The composition follows the general iconography of the court 'garden' miniatures of the era. Details Base: Natural handmade Bukhara silk paper (90% silk, 10% cotton) Technique: Tempera, watercolour, natural plant and mineral pigments, gold leaf (23 carat) Unique piece