418 
STATE OF THE ART IN PERSIA. 
looked on the efforts of human art, to represent a living, a 
breathing scene on canvass, did I behold one so animated, so 
moving, of the story it would relate. But the remembrance, 
then, of that memorable stag-hunt, did not arise from any 
resemblance in the pictures, but from their direct dissimilitude. 
In the hunting-piece of Futteli Ali Shah, groups of courtiers, 
mounted and caparisoned, stray over the surface to all points, 
east, west, north, and south ; something in the same way of 
the sieges, battles, and processions, stampt upon old-fashioned 
pocket-handkerchiefs we see in the possession of the common 
people in England, where the various actors gallop over mountains, 
walls, rivers, castles, nay, into the very sky, without any regard 
to time, place, or natural variation of distance. This picture 
was quite on the same model; the horses and huntsmen, on 
ground near a mile from the Shah, and farther towards the 
horizon, were in size much larger than either His Majesty or his 
steed. A production of the graphic art, so much inferior to those 
I had seen of the Sefi age, that I could not but be surprised to 
find the progress of taste in the lower orders of ornament, and 
its deterioration in this the highest range. All these pictures, 
both of old and modern times, are painted without regard to 
light and shade. A peculiarity of eastern artists, hard to be 
explained; for the sun in these countries being seldom obscured 
by clouds, the shadows from prominent objects are necessarily 
very strong, and the effects being constantly before the eye, we 
cannot but wonder how the artists miss seeing the advantage of 
such opposition, in their sketches after nature. Besides this 
defect, as I have just hinted, they are equally blind to the gradual 
diminution of receding objects ; in short, to the whole science of 
perspective: and thus, scales being over both eyes, fond as the 
