The tower a shah built just to see the view

The Golestan Palace detail that not everyone knows as they visit for the dazzle, the mirrored halls and the tilework so bright it almost sings, and it really is one of the most beautiful places I have ever tried to paint. But the real story is that of the tall tower on the eastern side, the one called Shams ol Emareh, the Edifice of the Sun.

Naser al-Din Shah had it built in the 1860s for a lovely, simple reason. He had seen pictures of the tall buildings of Europe, cities that reached upwards, and he wanted a high place of his own to stand and look out over Tehran, which back then barely rose above a single storey. So he built the tallest building in the city, five floors, two matching towers, and to keep it standing his builders reached for cast iron pillars, the first time metal had ever gone into a building in Tehran. He used to climb it with his wives just to see the city spread out below.

I painted the palace in watercolour and ink, all that tile and light, and the whole time I kept thinking about the plain iron hidden in the walls of that tower, a country's whole way of building nudged forward because one man wanted somewhere tall to watch the sun go down. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.