Michel-Francois Preaulx (French, 1796-1827); The Mausoleum of Oljeitu, or Muhammad Khodabandeh, the eighth Ilkhanid ruler of Persia (reg. 1304-16)

Michel-Francois Preaulx (French, 1796-1827)
The Mausoleum of Oljeitu, or Muhammad Khodabandeh, the eighth Ilkhanid ruler of Persia (reg. 1304-16)
Pen and ink and watercolour on paper laid down on canvas, signed MFP lower right
painting 225 x 360 mm.; canvas 295 x 426 mm.
Executed in 1808 or 1809.

Preaulx's only visit to Persia was as the official painter attached to Napoleon's mission to Persia under the leadership of Claude Mathieu de Gardane (1766-1818). The mission arrived in Persia in late 1807 and left in 1809. Preaulx documented the mission by producing watercolours of the various events which took place and the places visited by the mission. But as a trained architect he focused much of his attention on views of Persian monuments. The bulk of Preaulx's Persian paintings were preserved in an album that was deposited in 1911 in the fifth volume of the Perse, Memoires et documents―aux Archives du Ministere des Affaires etrangeres in Paris. This album was unfortunately misplaced after the Second World War (see Irene Natchkebia, 'Quelques reflections autour un dessin de Michel Francois Preaulx, peintre de la mission du General Gardane en Perse (1807-1809)', 7th European Conference of Iranian Studies, Krakow, September 2011 (abstracts published online)). All of the other paintings, except the current lot, have apparently been lost. Some however were published as lithographs, engravings or illustrations in Amedee Jaubert's Voyage en Armenie et en Perse, fait dans les annees 1805 et 1806 (1821), Louis Dubeux's Perse (1841), Henri Deherain's La vie de Pierre Ruffin – orientlaiste et diplomate 1742-1824 (1929), and Germaine Guillaume's Influences de ambassades sur les echange artisitique de la France et de l'Iran du XVIIe au debut du XIXe siecle presented at the 3rd Congres International d'Art et d'Archeologie Iraniens in St. Petersburg in 1935 [proceedings published in St. Petersburg in 1939]). The engraved version of the present painting is published in Jaubert's work (p. 352, Mosquee de Chah Khodabendeh a Sultanieh). Preaulx went on to become a famous Orientalist painter and produced a significant number of watercolours showing Turkish scenes.