Mughal painting

• 1. Introduction

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  Mughal painting is a tradition of miniature art that grew up inside one of history's most powerful courts, stretching from the 16th century to the 19th, and it carries within it the meeting of three distinct visual worlds: Indian, Persian, and Islamic. The style began not as a school but as a command. When the second Mughal emperor Humayun returned from exile in Persia, he brought two accomplished Persian painters with him, Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid Ali, and set them to work in a royal workshop that would define an era. What followed was a century of lavish commissions, fierce artistic ambition, and a visual language unlike anything produced in the subcontinent before. How did a dynasty of Muslim emperors build a tradition that eventually decorated Hindu and Sikh courts? Why did portraiture, almost entirely absent from Persian miniature painting, become one of the most important subjects in the Mughal atelier? And what happened when the patronage ran out?

• 2. Persian Roots, Indian Soil

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  Humayun, in exile at the Safavid court of Shah Tahmasp I in Tabriz, came into direct contact with the finest Persian miniature tradition of his day. He commissioned at least one substantial work during that period, an unusually large painting on cloth of Princes of the House of Timur, which is now held in the British Museum. When he returned to power in India, the two Persian masters he brought, Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid Ali, became the foundational figures of the new imperial atelier. A third master, Dust Muhammad, a disciple of the celebrated Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād, had already worked on projects including the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp and the Bahram Mirza Album. These men brought the Persian tradition of richly decorated borders, the elevated viewpoint, and the convention of relatively flat composition. But the Indian subcontinent already had its own layered visual culture. Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu painting traditions existed in religious manuscripts, in murals, and on cloth scrolls used by travelling singers. A vivid Kashmiri tradition of mural painting had flourished between the 9th and 17th centuries, seen in the murals of Alchi Monastery and Tsaparang; a number of Kashmiri painters were employed by Akbar, and traces of their influence appear in works including the Hamzanama. Babur, the dynasty's founder, left no miniatures and does not mention commissioning any in his memoirs, but he had placed his seal on older illustrated manuscripts, and his descendants understood themselves as heirs to a Persianate culture stretching back to Timur. What the new workshop needed was not one tradition or the other, but the two pulled into a single style.

• 3. Akbar's Workshop

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  Between 1562 and 1577, the imperial atelier worked on a single project of extraordinary scale: an illustrated manuscript of the Hamzanama comprising 1,400 cotton folios, each measuring approximately 69 by 54 centimetres. Cotton instead of paper, enormous by the standards of the form, and crowded with figures, the Hamzanama was described as a continuous series of romantic interludes, threatening events, narrow escapes, and violent acts, supposedly narrating the life of an uncle of Muhammad. The colossal project served as a crucible. Artists from Iran and from different parts of India were brought together, and the demands of working at scale forced their differing approaches into a unified style. By the project's end, the flat decorative compositions typical of Persian painting had been transformed into scenes with believable space, in which figures painted in the round could move and act. Akbar himself had studied painting in his youth under Abd al-Samad, and he paid close personal attention to the atelier's output. He had his library extend to illustrated versions of major Hindu epics: four copies of the Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, were produced between 1585 and around 1617. He commissioned translations of the Ramayana, the Bhagavata Purana, the Harivamsa, and the Panchatantra. Between 1570 and 1585, Akbar hired over one hundred painters to practise the Mughal style. Akbar particularly liked to have the names of the artists written below each miniature. Analysis of manuscripts shows individual miniatures were assigned to many painters; the incomplete Razmnama in the British Library contains 24 miniatures with 21 different names recorded.

• 4. The Art of the Portrait

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  Portraits of living people had never been a significant feature of either the Persian miniature tradition or earlier Indian painting, and yet the Mughal atelier made portraiture one of its defining subjects from fairly early in the style's development. The pose settled into a convention: the head in strict profile, the rest of the body half-turned toward the viewer. Western prints available at the Mughal court influenced this direction, and from the 17th century equestrian portraits of rulers became a popular borrowing from European sources. Another image type that became distinctive was the Jharokha Darshan, meaning balcony view or worship, showing the emperor on a balcony or at a window with a crowd of courtiers below. This was a daily ceremonial under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan before Aurangzeb stopped it as un-Islamic. Akbar maintained an album, now dispersed, consisting entirely of portraits of figures at his court, which he used as a practical reference when discussing appointments with advisors. Under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, the portrait of the ruler became firmly established as a leading subject. The Padshahnama, the official chronicle of Shah Jahan's reign, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor, was written in Persian on paper flecked with gold and contained portraits of courtiers and servants painted with considerable individuality; rulers and important nobles appeared in strict profile, while servants and common people appeared in three-quarter or frontal view. The question of who appears in these images remains contested. Some scholars hold that there are no known likenesses of figures like Jahanara Begum and Mumtaz Mahal, while others attribute miniatures from sources including the Dara Shikoh album and a mirror portrait at the Freer Gallery of Art to these women.

• 5. Jahangir and Europe

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  Jahangir, who reigned from 1605 to 1627, had a marked artistic inclination and collected illuminated Persian manuscripts and albums alongside European paintings. During his reign, brushwork in the atelier became finer and the colours lighter. He came into direct contact with the English Crown and received gifts of oil paintings that included portraits of the king and queen. He encouraged his artists to adopt the single-point perspective favoured by European painters, a departure from the flattened, multi-layered style of traditional miniatures. Jahangir particularly promoted paintings depicting events from his own life, individual portraits, and studies of birds, flowers, and animals. His autobiography, the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, also known as the Jahangirnama, contains several paintings including unusual subjects such as the union of a saint with a tigress and fights between spiders. Two notable allegorical paintings made during his reign were produced by Abu al-Hasan, the son of Aqa Riza: Jahangir Shooting the Head of Malik Ambar and Emperor Jahangir Triumphing over Poverty. Ustad Mansur, active from around 1590 to 1624, was a specialist in animals and plants who worked prominently during this period. Studies of animals and plants had been present in the tradition from the beginning. The text of the Baburnama includes descriptions of new animals Babur encountered in India, which Akbar had illustrated in later copies; an art historian, Milo C. Beach, argued that Mughal naturalism has been greatly overstressed and that early animal imagery drew considerably from Chinese animal paintings on paper, which appear to have circulated in India.

• 6. Decline and Diffusion

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  Aurangzeb, who ruled from 1658 to 1707, was never an enthusiastic patron of painting, largely for religious reasons. Around 1668 he turned away from the ceremonial pomp of the court, and after 1681 he moved permanently to the Deccan in pursuit of his slow conquest of the Deccan Sultanates. Some sources note that a few notable Mughal paintings were made for Aurangzeb, suggesting artists believed he was about to close the workshops and so exceeded themselves on his behalf. There was a brief revival during the reign of Muhammad Shah, who ruled from 1719 to 1748, but by the reign of Shah Alam II, who ruled from 1759 to 1806, the art had lost its earlier authority. As the workshops contracted, Mughal-trained artists left for other courts. Bhavanidas, active around 1700 to 1748, and his son Dalchand, active around 1710 to 1760, moved to Jodhpur to work for Abhai Singh, who reigned from 1724 to 1748, and then moved to Kishangarh around 1728. The Mughal style had already spread beyond the imperial court during its strongest period, carried to Muslim and Hindu princely courts across northern India and eventually to Sikh courts as well. Regional adaptations, sometimes called post-Mughal, sub-Mughal, or provincial Mughal, tended to be bolder but less refined. The competing schools that emerged included Rajput painting in the royal courts of Rajputana and the Company style in cities under the British East India Company. Late Mughal painting shows increased use of perspective and recession under Western influence, visible in the work of Ghulam Ali Khan, Ghulam Murtaza Khan, and Mazhar Ali Khan. A small number of artists in Lahore, concentrated mainly at the National College of Arts, continue to produce miniatures in the Mughal style today, with skills still transmitted from generation to generation.

• 7. The Artists Themselves

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  The Mughal atelier was organised around a division of labour. A senior artist would determine and draw the composition in outline; a second painter would apply the colours, often specialising in background areas; a third might specialise in portraiture, executing individual faces. Women artists were part of the workshop too. The Gulshan Album, known as the Muraqqa'-e Gulshan, included work by at least three women artists. Sahifa Banu made portraits and copies of compositions by Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād and Sultan 'Ali al-Mashhadi. Ruqaya Banu, Nuri Nadira Bano, and Nini made copies of European engravings and prints in their own style. Many of the painters whose names are recorded appear, from those names, to have been Hindu. Keshav Das, active from around 1570 to around 1604, was ranked fifth in a list of the seventeen best painters of the imperial workshop compiled by Abu'l Fazl; he was known primarily for his copies and adaptations of European engravings and for his grasp of European techniques of rendering space and volume. Daswanth, who died in 1584, worked especially on Akbar's Razmnama. Basawan was active from around 1580 to 1600; his son Manohar Das was active from around 1582 to 1624. The painter Balchand, active from around 1595 to around 1650, was the brother of Payag and was known for empathetic quality and elegant detailing, exemplified in his work the 'Death of Ināyat Khān'. Outside the imperial workshop, a sub-imperial school produced work for nobles rather than emperors; the patron Abd-ur-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, for example, commissioned the Freer Ramayana. One European artist, called Mandu or Mandu Firangi, trained in Western arts, worked in Akbar's atelier and with Miskin and Bhagawan illustrated folios of the Ramayana now held in the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum Trust at the City Palace in Jaipur.