Not all the Iznik offerings at Christie's in this Autumn's London Islamic Sales Week in are 16th-century classics. Lot 68 is pure 1920s and by the Kütahya-born Armenian Ottoman ceramicist David Ohanessian, whose work covers the walls of Sir Mark Sykes's Turkish Room at Sledmere in Yorkshire.
The single Iznik piece with the highest estimate, £50,000–£80,000, is a large tankard, 20.4cm high, from a private French collection. It is dated to 1580, and the whole polychrome pallete, including the bole-red, was fully mastered in the vivid fish-scale pattern. Very similar decoration appears in an Iznik lid in the Sadberk Hanım Museum. After the specatular success of a hexagonal tile from the Çinili Hamam in Istanbul, which features in the forthcoming Cornucopia 69, who knows what it might fetch. The hamam tile, a fairly battered affair, and one of thousands of tiles stripped off the walls of the hamam in the19th century, fetched £195,000 at auction in June.
Christopher Simon Sykes
