As an artist, Ismail Gulgee worked in various media, including painting, calligraphy and, unusually, inlaid hardstone, a technique often referred to as pietre dure (hard stone) in the European context and parchīnkārī (literally in Persian, the ‘craft of making hedgerows’) in India and Pakistan. In India, it was applied as a decorative technique to architecture and stone objects, while in Europe, it was often applied as decorative panels to furniture. From about the seventeenth century, it was also used to make larger-scale figurative compositions. Most of the workshops that developed this technique were located in Florence, Italy, though a well-known Florentine group, the Castrucci family, flourished in Prague under Emperor Rudolph II. Gulgee appears to have been inspired in part by the pictorial potential of the Castrucci compositions in stone, while adopting an entirely original style and subject matter. The dynamism of the posture of the Indian classical dancer in jade mosaic recalls Gulgee’s paintings, which are however, mainly abstract or related to calligraphic shapes. This work has a companion piece in blue lapis lazuli, now part of the collections of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto.
Ismail Gulgee (Abdul Mohammad Ismaili)
Kathak Dancer
1970s
Jades of varied colors
46 × 30 in (117 × 76 cm)
Ismail Gulgee (Abdul Mohammad Ismaili)
b.1926
Ismail Gulgee was a civil engineer who became an artist by choice in the 1950s. Working for over four decades, and mainly self-taught, he produced pencil sketches, calligraphic works, oil paintings, hardstone mosaics in varied compositions, and work in metal. He was well-known for his incisive portraits of world leaders and royal personages. For architectural settings, he produced elements such as the crescents that surmount the dome of the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, as well as its extraordinary mihrab in the form of a Qur’an open to pages from Surat al-Rahman in inlaid letters in Gulgee’s inimitable style of calligraphy. He gathered materials and inspirations from East and West, and spoke to his friends of “art as a journey, a pilgrimage, in search of a ‘there’ that unbeknown to us is also ‘here’, the continuation of an inner life, often no more than its visible externalization.” His work in calligraphy and other media can be found in various institutional settings and private collections throughout the Ismaili Muslim community.
