The most rewarding shows to have occurred in Portland this month were the Persian and Indian Miniatures at the Portland Art Museum, the small but per­ceptive drawings of deaf-mute James Castle at the Image Gallery and the austerely elegant canvases of Duane Zaloudek at the Fountain Gallery.

At the museum, the paintings in Ed­win Binney’s medieval Mideastern as­semblage provided viewers with a splen­did opportunity for studying the variety and excellence of an expression which, with its limitations, would certainly seem severe to our contemporary artists. The world one sees in these paintings is