Michael Chagnon
Synopsis:
The Aga Khan Museum collection includes a folio from the so-called “Drouot” Album, named after the Parisian auction house where its contents were dispersed in 1982. At the center of the folio is a late seventeenth-century painting that was produced in Iran. It is executed in the nim qalam (“half-pen”) technique and depicts a gathering of dervishes in mystical contemplation. Surrounding this work are a set of borders, signed by the artist Muhammad Baqir al-Imami and dated 1277 AH / 1860-61 CE, that are adorned with various carefully observed flower species rendered in gold and silver. This talk investigates the significance of these floral paintings and the rationale that may have guided their pairing with the folio’s central nim qalam painting.
Worksheet:
A worksheet for this video is available here.
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Selected References:
Imbert, Isabelle. “Flower Paintings in Indian and Persian Albums (16th-18th century),” 2025. 
Langer, Axel. “Stories from the Edge: The Reconstruction of Islamic Painting and Calligraphy Albums with the Help of Borders.” In Pathways of Art: How Objects Get to the Museum, edited by Esther Tisa Francini and Sarah Csernay, 297–310. Zürich: Scheidegger & Speiss, 2022.
Maury, Charlotte. “A First Overview of Golestan 1644: Album Making, Connoisseurship and the Painter Muhammad Baqir.” In Revealing the Unseen: New Perspectives on Qajar Art, edited by Gwenaëlle Fellinger and Melanie Gibson, 17–41. London: Gingko, 2021.
Nouveau Drouot. Art Islamique. Inde, Perse, Turquie. 23 June 1982. Hôtel Drouot: Paris, 1982. Auction catalog.
Roxburgh, David. The Persian Album, 1400-1600: From Dispersal to Collection. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Citation:
Michael Chagnon, “The Floral Borders of an Album Folio in the Aga Khan Museum,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 15 October 2026.
Michael Chagnon (PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2015) is Curator at the Aga Khan Museum, where has curated numerous acclaimed exhibitions including Rumi: A Visual Journey through the Life and Legacy of a Sufi Mystic (2023). His forthcoming exhibition Eternal Bloom: Gardens and the Art of Ecology (Spring 2027) focuses on the development and appreciation of gardens in Islamicate societies through an eco-critical lens. A specialist of Persianate painting and arts of the book, Dr. Chagnon’s recent essays include “Reza ‘Abbasi and the Embedded Image,” in the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts (2024) and “Flirting with the Radical: Intertextuality, Intervisuality, and Gendered Subversions in Manuscripts of Sūz u Gudāz,” in the Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World (2021).
