Joseph Lindon Smith: The Persepolis Paintings | A Special Exhibition at the OI Museum

The OI Museum's special exhibition, Joseph Lennon Smith, the Persepolis Paintings, celebrates the work of an American artist who captured his subjects with vivid realism. Smith's early career saw him often departing his New England home for such far-off destinations as Italy, Greece, and Egypt, driven by his ambition to preserve with paint the wonders of the ancient world. Over a 50-year period, Smith traveled repeatedly to Egypt, and his body of work consists of hundreds of paintings documenting its sculpture, temples, and tombs. Aware of Smith's exceptional skill and technique, James Henry Breasted, OI founder and then director, invited Smith to join the OI's expedition at Persepolis in order to paint the vast ruins and sculptured limestone reliefs of this great city of the Achaemenid Empire. At the time, OI archaeologists were carrying out the first scientifically-controlled archaeological excavations of Persepolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in present-day southwestern Iran. They documented with photography, film, and written records the royal buildings and preserved artifacts across the monumental terrace. In contrast to his many visits to Egypt, Smith's 1935 trip to Persepolis was the What is more, the six paintings he created at the site, now in the OI Museum collection and displayed in the present exhibition, mark the full extent of Smith's work with Persian monuments. Arriving at the site, Smith was immediately captivated, writing an elegant prose of his experience. Seated at the edge of the terrace, facing the wide stairway rising from the plain below, my conscious self yielded to the magic of the changing color, which, the sun-near setting, suffused with an indescribable light over the mountains and columns alike, and I pinched myself to be sure I was awake. This amaze and passion emanate from Smith's paintings, both his comprehensive landscape scenes of the monumental terrace and close-up portraits that reproduce to scale the relief sculpture of the great audience hall. The OI Museum exhibition presents these striking paintings created by Smith at Persepolis to the public for the first time in over 80 years, works whose existence has primarily been known through small-scale black-and-white reproductions. Standing face-to-face with these canvases, one can fully experience their monumentality and artistry, and also appreciate the affect of Smith's singular style of oil painting, a drybrush technique that rendered with remarkable accuracy and sensitivity the millennia-old stone surface. We welcome you to do just that, to experience firsthand this unique body of Joseph Lyndon Smith's work in the OI Museum's special exhibition, on display from January 27th through August 28th, 2022. During your visit, we also encourage you to wander down the hall to the Museum's Persian Gallery, where the story of the city of Persepolis is told through an exceptional collection of artifacts and archival photographs from this most memorable of OI expeditions.