Ustad Mansur

• 1. Introduction

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  Ustad Mansur died in 1624 carrying a title that Mughal Emperor Jahangir awarded to almost no one: Nãdir-al-'Asr, meaning Unequalled of the age. For a court painter who began his career with no name in the historical record, that is a remarkable distance to travel. His birth year is not known. The early miniatures that carry his name tag him with the suffix Naqqash, a word meaning artist or carver. That suffix suggests a family long involved in the crafts. He learned his trade at the margins of other men's compositions.

  What pulled him from that anonymity were two forces. One was an emperor who could not stop collecting living creatures. The other was a painter's eye that captured details zoologists would still be examining centuries later. What we know of who he was, and how he came to paint creatures that had never been painted before, comes almost entirely from the works themselves.

• 2. Among Akbar's Artists

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  The British Museum holds a copy of the Akbarnama, the official chronicle of Akbar's reign, dated to 1604. Akbar required that all artwork produced at his court include the artist's name in the margin. On four folios of the British Museum's copy, numbered 35, 110a, 110b, and 112a, Mansur's name carries the prefix ustad, meaning master. It was a distinction the court did not award freely.

  Between 1590 and 1595, Mansur worked on the Baburnama, the memoir of Emperor Babur, but only as a colourist. He applied pigment to compositions that more senior artists had drawn. Among his peers in that workshop were Basawan, Miskina, and Nanha. A single miniature showing Babur meeting his sister is attributed to Mansur from this period. That painting, folio 8, is in the National Museum.

  Abu'l-Fazl, Akbar's court historian, compiled a formal list of the artists under Akbar. Mansur was not on it. His early independent work includes a Veena-player dated around 1595. Around 1605, he made a coronation portrait of Jahangir, working together with the artist Manohar. These paintings built the case the 1604 Akbarnama folios confirmed: by then, ustad was part of his name. Jahangir succeeded Akbar in 1605. The commissions he would send Mansur differed from anything that had come before.

• 3. Jahangir's Living Collection

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  In 1612, Emperor Jahangir received a turkey cock from Goa and ordered Mansur to paint it. Seven years later, Shah Abbas of Persia sent Jahangir a Barbary falcon as a gift. Jahangir found it rare and beautifully patterned. When the bird died, he ordered a likeness made. Mansur was the painter sent for on both occasions.

  Naubat Khan, a musician who served in the courts of both Akbar and Jahangir, was among Mansur's portrait subjects. That commission points to a range that extended beyond natural history. The commissions Jahangir sent to Mansur followed a consistent pattern. He was the artist called when the emperor encountered a creature he had never seen before.

  Jahangir considered two artists at his court exceptional: Mansur and Abu'l Hasan. Abu'l Hasan received a title of his own, Nadir uz Zaman. Other painters working alongside them included Farrukh Beg, Govardhan, Inayat, Manohar, Muhammad Nadir, Murad, and Pidarath. Mansur earned his standing in that company. The scale of what Jahangir demanded from him becomes clearer when you follow the emperor to Kashmir in 1620.

• 4. Kashmir, 1620

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  When Jahangir visited Kashmir in 1620, Mansur was in the party. During that season, Mansur painted at least a hundred flowers from the valley. The output alone is striking. One of the best-known paintings from that period is a red tulip from Kashmir. Its exact species is still debated, with competing identifications including Tulipa lanata, T. montana, and T. lehmanniana.

  Also in Kashmir, along a mountain stream, Jahangir spotted a small brown bird. It dived into the water and stayed under for long stretches. He described what he saw in the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, his court memoir. He had the bird caught and examined to determine whether its feet were webbed. Two were brought to him. One died immediately. The other lived a day. He wrote his conclusion, and then gave an order. His words in the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri read: 'Its feet were not webbed like a duck's. I ordered Nadirul-asr Ustad Mansur to draw its likeness.' The bird was a brown dipper.

  Jahangir's instinct was to measure, verify, and then send for Mansur. The zebra he received as a gift in 1621 may have been the last animal Mansur ever painted. It is thought his career drew to a close around the end of Jahangir's reign in 1627. Two of the paintings from this period would outlast the court by centuries and become evidence in scientific debates he could not have imagined.

• 5. The Dodo and the Crane

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  Peter Simon Pallas gave the Siberian crane its binomial name in 1773, following the formal procedures of European natural history. Mansur had already painted the bird with extraordinary precision. His painting of the crane, held at the Indian Museum in Kolkata, shows wrinkles on the bare skin of the bird's face. It also shows the structure of the legs and a single small feather caught against one of the claws. The museum also holds his painting of a Bengal florican. The Siberian crane no longer makes its winter migration to India. The painting is among the last images of that presence.

  A painting of a dodo, found unsigned at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, is attributed to Mansur or to a close contemporary. The dodo was thought to have been brought to Jahangir's court via Surat, routed through Portuguese-controlled Goa. The English traveller Peter Mundy described two dodos at Surat, and the painting is thought to be based on one of them. Mundy was in the region between 1628 and 1633, several years after Mansur died. That timing makes the attribution uncertain, though the painting remains associated with his name.

  Abanindranath Tagore was taken to see Mansur's Siberian crane painting by E.B. Havell, the principal of the art school at Calcutta. Tagore examined the painting through a lens. The detail he found there moved him to leave oil on canvas behind and take up gouache on paper instead. Tagore was not the last person transformed by these paintings. Artists across three centuries would attempt to reproduce Mansur's work, though not always for reasons of admiration.

• 6. Style, Forgeries, and Legacy

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  Mansur's bird and animal paintings follow recognizable conventions. A single subject dominates the composition. The creature stands or feeds. Plants and insects fill the background. The floral borders common to Mughal painting can help in identifying his works. The level of anatomical specificity he brought to each subject is another marker.

  Miskina and Ikhlas, two painters senior to Mansur at the court, gave him his model for the fantasy birds he made early in his career. These imaginary subjects appear only in that early period. Once he established his own practice, he turned almost entirely to observed creatures.

  Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, artists imitated Mansur's compositions for the European export market. Some signed the copies with his name. Assessing whether any given painting is a genuine Mansur requires close examination of quality. One chameleon painting is attributed to him on those grounds. The image shows fused digits in opposed groups on each foot. A lighter band runs along the edge of the mouth, and a line of white scales marks the underside of the belly. That combination is consistent with an Indian chameleon, and the level of specificity consistent with Mansur himself.

  The National Museum in Delhi and the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum in Jaipur both hold works attributed to Mansur. The Chhatrapati Sivaji Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai holds attributed works as well. A crater on the planet Mercury has been named in his honour.