Preparing the palace feast, from the Garden (Bustān), by Sa`di

Muhammad Murad Samarqandi, attributed to

Preparing the palace feast, from the Garden (Bustān), by Sa`di. This busy scene shows palace cooks working to prepare and serve up a feast. A fire blazes under a cauldron, while the cook skins a carcass for a meat stew, and a row of covered dishes waits on the grass. On the lower left, a dervish and child beg for food. On the right, servants line up to enter the palace: this painting is the left half of a double page scene, and the opposite page (fol. 183v, in the codex, Per 297) shows the prince and his guests inside the palace. Folio, colours and gold on paper, painting (on recto, attributed Muhammad Murad Samarqandi, left side of a double-page composition), from the Garden (Bustān), by Sa`di, copied by Mir Salih al-Katib, possibly Bukhara, Uzbekistan, c. 1570, this painting one of eleven later added, for the library (kitabkhana) of Hidayat ibn Mir Mu`in al-Din Khwaja `Abd al-Rahim Juybari (d. 1628), possibly at the dynastic Sufi shrine complex of Char Bakr, Sumitan, near Bukhara, Uzbekistan, c. 1616.