Exhibition of KAMĀL-AL-MOLK and ḠAFFĀRI family’s paintings

 Iranian painter of the European academic style during the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods. He descended from a family that had produced a number of artists since the Afsharid period.

kamāl-al-Molk’s works may be divided into three periods: before his trip to Europe (1880-97), during his studies and works in Florence and Paris (1897-1901), and after his return from Europe (1901-32). Some art critiques—from his loyal students and admirers to some of those who are critical of his works—maintain that most of Kamāl-al-Molk’s works before his studies in European museums may be considered “mediocre,” but that they flourished after his return from Europe

Kamāl-al-Molk was aiming to develop a national school of European naturalistic art, much as his intellectual peers were aspiring to westernize the country and to promote the Persian language and Islamic Iran in search of an authentic national cultural identity. His themes of the common man and popular subjects sometimes tended towards the “self-Orientalizing

Nevertheless, with his charismatic personage and romantic image as a revolutionary artist and a modernizer at a time of national decline, Kamāl-al-Molk remains a towering figure in the history of Persian art, and is popularly perceived as the father of modern Persian Painting.

Kamal-ol-Molk died in Nishapour, Iran, in 1940. Mournful people, especially family and closely related friends, marched his body next to the tomb ofpoet, Attar.​