The emergence of visual modernity in Qajar Iran has often been explained in historical and art-historical scholarship as the result of a direct encounter between Iran and European aesthetic concepts. However, a comparative examination of the routes through which these concepts travelled reveals that the decisive mediating role of the Ottoman Empire acting as an active cultural filter and an initial locus of localization has largely been overlooked. The central problem addressed in this study concerns the actual trajectory through which visual modernity took shape in Iran and the factors that enabled the formation of a distinctive, multilayered version of modernity during the Qajar period. Accordingly, the study assumes that visual modernity in Iran was not the outcome of direct transmission from Europe but the result of a circulation of visual concepts from Europe to the Ottoman Empire and subsequently to Iran, during which the Ottomans functioned as agents of adaptation, refinement, and cultural alignment with the Islamic world. The aim of this research is to reconstruct this multi-stage trajectory and to explain how modern visual concepts were reinterpreted within the Shiʿi tradition, courtly structures, and Iranian aesthetic sensibilities. Employing a descriptive-analytical method based on documentary study, comparative visual analysis, and the examination of cultural transfer networks, the findings indicate that European artistic concepts were first tested and adapted in Ottoman artistic institutions before being transferred to Iran in a culturally modified form. Iran, in turn, re-localized these adapted concepts by integrating them with its own traditional, religious, and aesthetic frameworks, thereby producing the hybrid visual styles characteristic of Qajar art. Ultimately, the study concludes that Qajar visual modernity was neither mere imitation of the West nor a rupture with tradition, but the outcome of a multilayered process of conceptual circulation and creative localization within an inter-civilizational sphere linking Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran.