Ibrahim Mirza

Ibrahim Mirza, Solṭān Ebrāhīm Mīrzā, in full Abu'l Fat'h Sultan Ibrahim Mirza (Persian: ابوالفتح سلطان ابراهیم میرزا; April 1540 – 23 February 1577) was a Persian prince of the Safavid dynasty, who was a favourite of his uncle and father-in-law Shah Tahmasp I, but who was executed by Tahmasp's successor, the Shah Ismail II.

Although most of his library and art collection was apparently destroyed by his wife after his murder, surviving works commissioned by him include the manuscript of the Haft Awrang of the poet Jami which is now in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.[1] Ibrahim Mirza was a grandson of the founder of the Safavid dynasty, Ismail I (1487–1524) by Ismail's fourth son, prince Bahram Mirza Safavi (1518–1550), who was governor of Khorasan (1529–32), Gilan (1536–37) and Hamadan (1546–49), and also a commissioner of manuscripts.

Ibrahim Mirza, however, who grew up at court, was a long-time favourite of Tahmasp, and remained loyal, and was appointed governor of Mashhad at the age of 16, arriving there in March 1556.

[2] The appointment had a nominal element — Tahmasp himself had received his first governorship at the age of four — but was also political, connected to Ibrahim Mirza's mother, who came from the Shirvanshah dynasty.

[8] As the new shah, Ismail II, who may have been mentally unstable after spending 20 years in prison, had soon alienated the Qizilbash who were powerful at court and especially his influential sister Pari Khan Khanum.

When Shah Tahmasp, previously the leading patron of Persian painting at the time, ceased to commission manuscripts in the 1540s, Ibrahim Mirza's workshop was for a period the most important in Persia.

[13] Shaykh Muhammad may have been responsible for the individualized faces in certain pictures, atypical of Persian painting, and looking forward to the Mughal miniature, a tradition that was beginning just in these years.

Indeed, one artist, Mirza Ali, is claimed by Stuart Cary Welch and others to have contributed to the Freer Jami, while the theory of Barbara Brend that he was the same person as Abd al-Samad would place him working for Humayun and his son Akbar in just these years, first in Kabul and then in India.

[21]After Ibrahim Mirza was murdered, his wife, who only survived him by three months, is recorded as destroying his library and personal possessions, washing the manuscripts in water, smashing what was probably Chinese porcelain, and burning other things.