Photo 198

Black cloth-covered album, 213 x 243 mm, containing mounted prints with handwritten captions. The captions correspond to those listed on the letterpress title-page. The album was published by Augustus Le Messurier, Bombay Engineers, at Calcutta in May 1888 and passed to the Intelligence Branch of the Quarter Master General's Department, India, in July 1888. By October it was at the War Office Library in London. The album finally came to the India Office Library, via the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in 1964. The photographs depict topographical views and portraits collected by Le Messurier during his visit to Iran in 1887. Some mention is made of the photographs in his book, From London to Bokhara and a ride through Persia (London: 1889). He records buying photographs in Tehran and being presented with signed portraits by the Sultan of Isfahan and the Amir Panj (Prints 18 and 15 respectively). The album also contains two lithographs after sketches by Le Messurier. The same views appear in his book, but there redrawn by Mr Jobbings, Superintendant of the School of Art, Calcutta. Prints 6, 9, 11, 16 and 20 are signed in Cyrillic script. This signature was deciphered and the photographer identified as Antoin Sevruguin by Corien J. M. Vuurman, and it has been assumed that the other images in the album are also Sevruguin's work. Vuurman suggests that at least some of these images date from the early 1870s. Sevruguin, an Armenian Christian of Russian descent, ran a studio in Tehran from the early 1870s until the 1920s, and was an official photographer to the Imperial Court of Persia.