Sultan Muhammad

Sultan Mohammad (Persian: سلطان محمد) was an Iranian painter at the Safavid court in Tabriz under Shah Ismail I (r. 1501–1524) and Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524–1576). He served as the director of Shah Ismail's artists’ workshop and as the first project director of the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp. He gave painting lessons to Tahmasp when he was the crown prince. Secure attribution of miniatures to Sultan Mohammed is limited: only two miniatures are directly signed by him, Celebration of Id and Allegory of drunkenness from the 1531 Cartier Hafiz, and one miniature is attributed to him by his contemporary Dust Muhammad: The Court of Gayumars. The other miniatures are attributed to him based on stylistic similarities and other circumstantial evidence. Sultan Mohammad was a native of Tabriz. He was the father of the artist Mirza Ali, who also contributed to the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, and the grandfather of the painter and illuminator Mir Zayn al-'Abidin, who was active in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. He died before 1555.