“The book shows the very first images of Tehran depicted in the works of orientalists, foreign merchants, and ambassadors of Western governments,” the publisher wrote in the book’s introduction.
Through drawings of Tehran’s landscapes, buildings, and streets, the book intends to represent a comprehensive picture of the city over the past century.
“Images of national and traditional ceremonies, landscapes, pantheons, cemeteries, and other aspects of the citizens’ everyday life have been illustrated in the book,” the publisher noted.
The book includes two major chapters. The first chapter, ‘Tehran before the introduction of photography’, studies subjects such as “the image of Tehran in the drawings of Western travelogue writers”, “Tehran on the European maps”, and “the city and people in the works of Qajar artists”. The second chapter totally comprises the drawings of the city in the works of different artists.
The author writes although Modernism created a new tone in the Iranian paintings and replaced landscape drawings, modern artists such as Mahmoud Javadipour, Ahmad Esfandiari, and Abdollah Aameri kept drawing nature in their own style. Tehran is illustrated in the paintings of the three artists as a symbol of peace and dependence on the old traditions of daily life when the city had not faced with the urbanization in the early years of the Pahlavi era yet.”