The collections of Iranian art at the Yale University Art Gallery, both pre-Islamic and Islamic, are kept by the departments of Asian Art, Ancient Art, and Coins and Medals. The strengths of the collections are in textiles and ceramics. There are over six hundred textiles in the collection. The majority of them were assembled by Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman and were given to Yale in the 1930s by Mrs. William H. Moore. Many of them were published in Pope and Ackerman’s A Survey of Persian Art (1938). The nearly one hundred ceramics represent the Neolithic period through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The mina’i wares are particularly strong. The collection of works on paper is smaller but choice. One highlight is an important group of Timurid period manuscript pages from a now dispersed Majma’ al-tawarikh of Hafiz-I Abru.
An overview of the arts of Islam at the Yale University Art Gallery is available on the Gallery’s website at artgallery.yale.edu/arts-islam. The collection can be searched through our online database at artgallery.yale.edu/collection/search. Search on Persian and/or Iranian in the culture field and narrow your search by choosing specific materials or types of objects in the classification field.