kinds of object. A silver Landau carriage in the collection was commissioned in 1915 by Bhavsinhji II, Maharaja of Bhavnagar and was kept by his family until 1968 for use in special events. Enamel production in Iran dates from at least the early Safavid period in the 14th century and flourished during the Qajar period (1785–1914), whose artisans had a strong preference for gold as a base. Niccolao Manucci, an Italian writer and traveller who visited the Safavid court in 1655, noted Shah Abbas II employed a team of French enamellers and supervised their work. By the late 17th century there was an official position of Court enameller. By the end of the 18th century Iranian enamellers had mastered painted enamel, and were adding it to a wide variety of items for ordinary citizens as well as for royalty. The collection has several items from the Qajar period, including a silver-gilt hookah with portraits of people in Iranian and Western dress. By the turn of the 20th century, the court of Ottoman Turkey had adopted the European convention of gifting decorative objects, with relevant emblems, as marks of favour. An example in the collection is a brooch with the name of Abdul Hamid II spelled out in diamonds. The collection has some objects commissioned by the Ottoman Empire from European artists. These include snuff boxes from Geneva and Paris depicting Mahmud II and a Bosporus landscape, one bearing the name of Muhammad Ali of Egypt in diamonds. Japanese works Japanese artists did not start producing cloisonné enamel until the 1830s, coinciding with the sharp fall in the Shogun's power, and followed by the Meiji Revolution, but their techniques advanced quickly. By the 1870s, enamel art works were being exhibited at national exhibitions and at world's fairs. From 1870 to 1900, the form went through a very rapid evolution which introduced translucent colours, dark black backgrounds, and smoother surfaces without cracks or pitting. New techniques included ("piling up") which places layers of enamel upon each other to create a three-dimensional effect, or which creates panels of transparent or semi-transparent enamel, and (), in which the metal foundation is hammered outwards to create a relief effect. "Wire-less" cloisonné or was introduced by Kawade Shibatarō and taken up by other artists. Namikawa Sōsuke created pictorial enamel works so similar to paintings they were shown in the painting section of the Japan–British Exhibition, rather