An album page with a Safavid drawing and borders from an album made for Emperor Shah Jahan, Persia

An album page with a Safavid drawing and borders from an album made for Emperor Shah Jahan, Persia and India, circa 1625-50, ink, gouache and gold on paper, the drawing with false attribution to the artist Farrukh Beg, laid down with inner borders of floral illumination with panels of nasta'liq calligraphy, wide outer borders with floral decoration from an album made for Emperor Shah Jahan, 38.6 x 24.9cm. Provenance: Ex-collection Ardeshir; Sotheby's London, 'The Property of a Gentleman', 10 July 1973, lot 8; Sotheby's, 05/10/2010, lot 58This album page has been assembled using the exquisite floral borders from one of the well-known albums made for the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. The albums made for Shah Jahan and his father Jahangir in the first half of the seventeenth century were notable for the extremely high quality of the border decoration, and the leading artists of the royal atelier were employed to decorate them.The skillful drawing of an old man with a grey beard is executed in Safavid style of the first half of the seventeenth century, approximately contemporaneous with the production of the royal albums of Shah Jahan. However, it is probably not the original work intended for this album page. More likely, it was inserted into these borders, which may have lost their original central panel, sometime in the early twentieth century, when many album leaves were disassembled and re-assembled. The drawing bears a later and fictitious attribution to the Perso-Mughal artist Farrukh Beg.Laid down on card backing