Aga Khan Lecture Series: "Enchanting Delights: Qajar Still-life Painting in Context”

This lecture will trace the development of this short-lived art form and its context. It will also suggest the possible meanings of these compositions to their nineteenth-century beholders and how they can help sharpen notions of cultural identity and social status during the Qajar period, answering questions such as:  What do these paintings tell us about how Qajar royalty and the elite perceived themselves and how they desired others to perceive them?

Dr. Maryam Ekhtiar is Patti Cadby Birch Curator in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century Persian art and culture, calligraphy, and later Persian painting. She received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University in 1994 and has worked and taught at various museums and universities, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York University and Swarthmore College. 

She was co-editor of the exhibition catalogue Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925 (1998), Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011), and Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators, which was released in 2012. She has organized several exhibitions, written articles and lectured extensively in the fields of Iranian art and contemporary art from the Middle East. Her latest book, How to Read the Art of Islamic Calligraphy, was published by the Met in 2018. One of her most recent articles is “Ahl al-Bayt Imagery Revisited: A Drawing by Ismaʿil Jalayir at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Revealing the Unseen: New Perspectives on Qajar Art (2021). She is currently working on an exhibition on Orientalism scheduled to open at the Met in summer 2026.