This brilliant vivid and impressionistic series of sketches formed during her 1892 stay in Persia is Gertrude Bells first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism Persian Pictures is an evocative virtuosic meditation moving sinuously between Persias heroic complex mythical past and its present decline the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly secret mysterious life of the East the lives of its women its enclosed quasimedieval gardens from the bustling cities to the lonely was