Persian Pictures Author:Gertrude Bell This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, Persian Pictures is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic, complex, mythical past and its present decline; the public f... more »ace of Tehran and the otherworldly ?secret, mysterious life of the East’, the lives of its women, its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram – the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. Persian Pictures is both travelogue and meditation, an elegiac and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.« less