MUGHAL PAINTING, LATER

MUGHAL PAINTING, LATER Although is was the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) who, by virtue of prosperous and stable reign, contributed toward the blossoming and development of a Mughal school of painting distinct from the Persian models from which it originated, it was under the brilliant reigns of his successors, emperors Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), that Mughal art and painting reached their apogee.

Emperor Jahangir's interest in painting dates to his early years, when he avidly collected the European engravings brought to the Mughal court by Jesuit missionaries. He was attracted to the "exoticism" of these works from the Flemish and German schools. When the young prince, rebelling against his father, Akbar, established an independent and short-lived court in Allahabad between 1599 and 1604, he did not neglect to take with him a few of the painters from the imperial studio, such as Aqa Reza and his son, Abu al-Hasan, as well as Mirza Ghulam and Bishandas. When he acceded to the imperial throne, Jahangir quite naturally inherited painters from the royal studio founded by Akbar. His taste for painting grew and became more discerning through contact with the delicate and refined works produced by these experienced artists, who placed their talent in service of his reign. An aesthete and a demanding connoisseur, Jahangir took legitimate pride in his aptitude for distinguishing without the slightest hesitation the work of a particular artist from that of his colleagues. Hence he notes in his memoirs, the Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī: "As regard myself, my liking for painting and my practice in judging it have arrived at such a point that when any work is brought before me, either of deceased artists or those of the present day, without the names being told me, I say on the spur of the moment that it is the work of such and such a man. And if there be a picture containing many portraits, and each face be the work of a different master, I can discover which face is the work of each of them. If any other person has put in the eye and eyebrow of a face, I can perceive whose work the original face is, and who has painted the eye and eyebrow" (vol. 2, pp. 20–21). The emperor even went so far as to grant flattering and prestigious titles to some of the most eminent painters in the imperial studio. Hence the title of Nādir az-Zamān (wonder of the time) was bestowed on Abu al-Hasan in 1618, and Nādir al-ʿAsr (wonder of the age) on the animal painter Ustad Mansur.

The extensive illustration of historical, literary, and epic manuscripts characteristic of Akbar's reign declined rapidly under Jahangir. Whereas the earlier illustrations were the work of two or three artists collaborating on a single painting, the new emperor preferred miniatures executed by a single artist, whose talent and style could thereby be displayed more freely and brilliantly. These isolated miniatures were then mounted on album pages (muraqqa), where they alternated with brightly colored pages of text done by renowned calligraphers. The albums assembled during Jahangir's reign thus bear witness to the eclecticism of the sovereign's tastes. The dazzling calligraphies and Mughal miniatures executed by the masters of the imperial studio were complemented by European engravings and Persian and Deccani miniatures. The borders and margins surrounding these paintings and calligraphies were highlighted with floral motifs painted with extraordinary mastery and extreme delicacy and sometimes augmented with small human figures or delicate little scenes depicted with phenomenal intensity. They attest to the virtuosity that the painters in the imperial studio had achieved. Their art was no longer confined to miniatures alone but extended to the entire surface of the page.

Beginning with Jahangir's reign, Mughal painting was dominated by the art of the portrait. These were psychological and realistic portraits (no longer idealized, as in the Persian aesthetic tradition), in which the artist was sometimes unsparing in his endeavor to capture and express his model's personality. The greatest artists in the imperial studio were extraordinary portraitists, who gave the Mughal art of the portrait its pedigree: Abu al-Hasan, Bichitr, Hashim, Govardhan, and Bishandas, among others. Recall that in the last decades of the sixteenth century, Emperor Akbar had already expressed the desire to better know the dignitaries and nobles of his empire through individualized portraits. Abu-al-Fazl, the chronicler of Akbar's reign, mentions in Aʾīn-i-Akbarī the sovereign's original decision to put together a vast portrait album of the grandees in the kingdom: "His Majesty himself sat for his likeness, and also ordered the likenesses taken of all the grandees of the realm. An immense album was thus formed: those that have passed away have received a new life, and those who are still alive have immortality promised them" (vol. 1, p. 115). The albums assembled during Jahangir's reign were adorned with brilliant and penetrating portraits of emperors, princes, and major dignitaries. Based on a rigorously static conception of the human figure, Mughal portraits traditionally depict their subject with the face represented in profile (bodies are generally represented in three-quarters profile) to allow better definition and legibility of facial features. The human figures, fixed in sober and often hieratic poses, stand out sharply against the bare and light-colored ground of the page. There were both individual and group portraits. Nobles and dignitaries gathered together at formal royal audiences (durbār) were always captured in poses marked by stiffness and deference. Mughal portraits were hence also a brilliant reflection of the court, which was governed by strict etiquette and ceremonial, designed to glorify the sovereign and extol his power and majesty. Jahangir's interest in the individualized and intensely realistic portraits sometimes led him to ask his painters to observe the ravages of the human body caused by illness and then to reproduce them with complete fidelity in their pictorial works. Hence in 1618 the emperor commanded his painters to do a portrait of one of his dignitaries, Inayat Khan, who was dying from an illness and from the overconsumption of opium. A drawing and a painting depicting Inayat Khan a few hours before his death are known to us. In their poignant and morbid realism, they bear witness to the extraordinary degree of expressiveness and naturalism henceforth achieved by Mughal portraits. A similar propensity for naturalism also governed depictions of fauna and flora painted during Jahangir's reign. The monarch, captivated by the sight of the odd or unusual, readily assigned the great animal painter Ustad Mansur (Nādir al-ʿAsr) the task of representing all animal species whose presence at the Mughal court might seem out of the ordinary. For instance, in 1621 the talented Mansur did a striking portrait of the famous zebra brought back from Abyssinia by Mir Jaʿfar, which the emperor presented as a gift to Shah Abbas I of Persia. Jahangir's interest in the animal and plant world was inherited from Emperor Babur, whose memoirs are bursting with lively and detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna found in the recently conquered India. That interest was catered to by incomparable painters whose works were to achieve the same degree of realism and objectivity as the brilliant portraits of imperial dignitaries.

One of the most original contributions of Jahangir's painters to the history of imperial Mughal painting was unquestionably the extraordinary "allegorical portraits" commissioned by the sovereign in 1616–1620. The subtle and erudite iconography of these complex, ambitious works was derived in large part from European imagery discovered by the Mughals in Flemish and German engravings brought by the Jesuit missionaries in 1580. They show Emperor Jahangir illuminated by vast golden nimbi and shining like a star. Sometimes he is standing on a large globe, laden with gems or endowed with the attributes of royal power. In other works he is surrounded by putti, who fly through the clouds holding parasols, a symbol of dignity and sovereignty, or the sword or the Timurid crown. These brilliant and profoundly symbolic works show that a few of the greatest painters in the imperial studio, such as Abu al-Hasan and Bichitr, deliberately assimilated foreign motifs: the crown, the earthly globe, the hourglass, the shining nimbus, or putti brandishing the insignia of sovereignty. These motifs were subtly integrated into imperial iconography and were sometimes associated with ancient Islamic symbols that also celebrated royalty and dynastic legitimacy. These "allegorical portraits," which bear striking witness to the iconographical and pictorial eclecticism of Mughal art, continued to be produced—though in a less exalted and less grandiloquent form—during the reign of Emperor Shah Jahan. Among their iconographical sources were obviously the European paintings that Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador to King James I of England, brought to the Mughal court when he was received by Jahangir in 1615. In particular, the emissary to the king of England presented the Mughal emperor with portraits done by the famous English miniaturist Isaac Oliver, and with one or several portraits of the king himself. These works obviously played a role in enriching the thematic and aesthetic repertoire of the Mughal painters charged with executing the famous "allegorical portraits" designed to exalt the majesty and omnipotence of the Great Mughal.

Emperor Akbar, obsessed with the majesty and legitimacy of the Mughal dynasty, had already commissioned imperial painters to illustrate important historical manuscripts that related the great feats of his ancestors Genghis Khan and Timur (Chingīznāma, Taʾrīkh i-Khāndān i Tīmūriyya). His successors Jahangir and Shah Jahan took upon themselves that desire to constantly define and remember the historical and political meaning of the Timurid line and the Mughal dynasty. Under their reigns, imperial painters created many "dynastic portraits," works that are brilliant at a symbolic level and yet sometimes repetitive and formulaic. On a single page, they show Timur offering the imperial crown to Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty in 1526, in the presence of his son and successor Humayun; or they depict Akbar, seated between Jahangir and Shah Jahan, handing over the Timurid crown to the latter.

In 1605, the year of his coronation, Emperor Jahangir began to write his memoirs, the Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī (or Jahāngīrnāma), which covered the time between his accession to the throne and the nineteenth year of his reign (1624). Several pages of this manuscript are illustrated with remarkable paintings that bear the signatures of the greatest painters of the imperial studio. These illustrations are now dispersed, housed in various public and private collections. This was the only historical manuscript of importance to have been illustrated during the reign of Emperor Jahangir, who preferred superb albums of paintings (muraqqa) to the amply illustrated historical and literary manuscripts in vogue under the previous reign.

Hence it is from the reign of his successor, Emperor Shah Jahan, that the most sumptuous of the imperial Mughal manuscripts dates, the famous Pādshāhnāma housed in the Royal Library of Windsor Castle. This two-volume official chronicle of the reign of Shah Jahan, composed by ʿAbd ul-Hamid Lahori, relates the first twenty years of the imperial reign. The manuscript of the first volume includes forty-four illustrations of great beauty, done by the best imperial painters and depicting for the most part royal audiences (durbār), feasts, ceremonies, hunts, and military campaigns. In some sense, this splendid imperial manuscript with dazzling illustrations using a sumptuous palette constitutes the most accomplished synthesis of Mughal pictorial genius, the result of diverse influences and reminiscences subtly assimilated and transposed in a profoundly original style.

All the same, Emperor Shah Jahan displayed more interest in architecture than in painting. Hence the pictorial currents that emerged during his reign cannot be fundamentally distinguished from those seen during that of Jahangir. There was, however, a revival of interest in the theme of the prince visiting a Hindu or Muslim holy man at his retreat to benefit from his wisdom and teaching. (Painters in Akbar's studio had often illustrated this theme in the last decades of the sixteenth century.) These miniatures illustrating the "visit to a holy man" or a "gathering of ascetics" can no doubt be attributed to the patronage of Prince Dara Shikoh, Emperor Shah Jahan's eldest son and heir apparent, who was by nature inclined toward philosophy, spirituality, and the study of religions and who had a well-known penchant for mysticism. Some of the greatest imperial painters, such as Govardhan, produced superb and poignant studies of holy men depicted in solitude and contemplation at their woodland hermitages, happened upon by a prince or nobleman in quest of wisdom or spiritual truth. These profound and often moving works allowed the artist to evoke the opposition between spiritual power, incarnated by the holy man, and temporal power, incarnated by the prince, and to allude symbolically to the preeminence of the former over the latter.

The chief aesthetic characteristics of Mughal painting were maintained under the reign of Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), though the works produced in his imperial studios were usually marked by a less accomplished and less brilliant style than during the previous reign. That austere reign was clearly less favorable to the flourishing of the fine arts. (In 1659 Aurangzeb did not hesitate to condemn his brother, Prince Dara Shikoh, to death for impiety and apostasy toward Islam.) In 1665 Aurangzeb, whose interest in painting was on the decline, even went so far as to shut down the imperial studios. Artists, henceforth deprived of imperial favor and support, sought to place themselves in the service of new patrons, often chosen from among the nobles and major dignitaries. A brief pictorial revival characterized the turbulent and unhappy reign of Emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748), which the sack of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 would bring to a brutal and tragic end.

Amina Okada

See alsoAkbar ; Aurangzeb ; Babur ; Jahangir ; Shah Jahan

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allami, Abuʾl Fazl. Aʾin-i-Akbarī, translated by H. Blochmann. Kolkata: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1938–1939.

Jahangir. The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri; or Memoirs of Jahangir, translated by A. Rogers and edited by H. Beveridge. Reprint, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968.