Vintage Persian Khatam Pen Stand, Painted Miniature, c. 1940–1970

The Piece

A small Persian desk pen stand: a rectangular plinth with a shallow pyramidal top, every surface of it covered in khatam micro-mosaic. The pattern is built from six-pointed stars in pale bone and olive green with dark centres, ringed by orange-red and near-black triangles, with brass catching gold where the light finds it. The individual pieces run to a few millimetres each. A recessed rectangular panel on the crown, framed by a plain rosewood fillet, carries a hand-painted miniature.

The miniature is a woman's head and shoulders inside a yellow-ringed roundel on a cream ground, with the field around her worked in a fine red and green scrolling arabesque. She wears a ribbed rose-pink wrap over dark hair, banded with a line of white pearl dots, one long fall of the cloth coming down past the shoulder. The brows run as a single continuous arch, the mouth is a small red bud, and a dark curl breaks loose at the cheek.

A tapering brass socket rises from the panel, raked forward rather than standing upright, turned with incised rings and cut off on a matching slant at the mouth so that a pen sits at a writing angle instead of straight up. It screws down through the panel on a collar. The plinth is banded in bone around its lower edge, the whole piece is finished in a high gloss varnish, and the base is covered in red wool baize, worn soft and fuzzed along the edges.

History & Provenance

Khatam-kari is Persian micro-mosaic, and knowing how it is made explains what you are looking at. Rods of wood, brass and bone are bundled into a bar whose cross section is a single star, glued solid, then sliced into wafer-thin sheets and laid down as veneer. That is why the geometry here runs continuously over the bevels and around every corner without a break, and why the individual elements are only a few millimetres across.

It is slow and exacting work, and by the early twentieth century it had very nearly died out. The Encyclopaedia Iranica records only six master inlay workers left in Isfahan by 1920.

What brought it back was deliberate. Reza Shah commissioned khatam for the Tehran palaces, vocational arts schools were founded across Iranian cities through the 1930s, and the Shirazi master Golriz moved to Isfahan and taught there for thirty-six years, re-establishing the craft in the city. By the 1950s Isfahan had roughly a hundred khatam craftsmen working in forty workshops, and about a hundred painters in twenty-eight more, working bone, ivory and wood for a growing tourist and export market. This stand comes out of that rebuilt trade, not the old one.

The form places it as well. Traditional Persian writing equipment is the qalamdan, a long sliding box that holds reed pens flat. An upright threaded socket for a Western dip or fountain pen, mounted on a desk plinth and felted underneath, is a Western object made in Persian materials for a foreign buyer. That idea arrives with the rebuilt export trade, and it belongs to the decades when people still kept a pen standing on a desk, before the ballpoint made the desk pen set obsolete. Taken with the yellowed varnish and the wear around the socket collar, it is offered as c. 1940 to 1970.

The woman in the roundel is a type rather than a person. The joined brow, the pearl-trimmed band, the small red mouth and the loose curl are the beauty conventions of Qajar court painting, carried forward by the Isfahan miniaturists of the revival and repeated across thousands of painted bone panels on boxes, frames and desk pieces. Nobody sat for it. It is the face the workshops painted.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is the kind of object that makes a desk look like it belongs to someone. It is small enough to sit beside a lamp and a stack of books without asking for room, and detailed enough that anyone who picks it up spends a minute with it. The mosaic reads as warm pattern from across a room and resolves into hundreds of individual stars in the hand.

It also still works. Put a fountain pen in it and the rake holds the pen at the angle you would actually reach for.