A reading on the bathroom wall paintings of Mehdi-Qoli‌-Beyg in Mashhad

Bath has been considered as a social hangout for the Iranian people from old times. Wall-painting is an art which came to its peak during the Safavid period and continued until the Qajar period. During the Qajar period, buildings with wall paintings in different fields have remained, which is in the continuation of the art of Safavid and Zandieh era.
This art was applied in public places, which was a good place to show artworks to people and acquaint them with art and culture. Illustrators consider these public buildings to be the right place to present and portray their works. One of these. In the study of wall-painting in the spaces used in the Safavid period, we can name a bath which was built in the era of Shah Abbas Safavi by his order in 1027 AH.This building, which is located in Khorasan, has been studied under the name of Shah Bath, Mehdi Gholibeik bath, and Razavi bath. There are all paintings with the themes of the story of Shahnameh. In the dome section of the changing room of Bath, there is a picture of the Qajar period, which is completely influenced by the space of this period. Drawings are the same pictures of stories which were taken from the artistic style of the Safavid and Qajar eras, in which there are no images and dimensions. Shah's bath paintings in the parts of ceiling and wall of the changing room after the peeling of the walls are 28 layers, 13 of its top layers have been repaired skillfully with the theme of human images.
In the first step, our goal is the visual and thematic study of the mentioned paintings in the changing rooms in the bath and then, to study the effective display and expression of social and political elements of that period on this part of the architecture of the bath. Therefore, the article tries to answer the questions on the form and content of paintings of the drawings of the changing room of the bath and analyzed the feedback of the spirit and intellectual atmosphere prevailing on the Qajar period.
The research approach was qualitative and the research method was descriptive-analytic; and data collection has been established based on library, documents and field information. Theoretical framework for understanding the political atmosphere of that time used Bourdieu's field theory which was explained with an emphasis on the fields of politics. Findings are presented in two parts: First, paintings of changing room were classified in terms of content in six areas, including religious inscriptions, mythological scenes, literary and romantic stories, folk life of the people, the heroes and the advent of modernism. Secondly, these paintings represent the artists' view of their environment, regarding to the ruling ideology of the period. It shows that despite the arrival of modernity in Iran and the court's affection for it, the artist was dependent on his own cultural motifs, felt a sense of belonging. In fact, bath painting, is a representative of the current state of contemporary society and people.