Splendor on Paper, The World of Mughal Painting

The text below is the excerpt from the book Art of India (ISBN: 9781783107834), written by Vincent A. Smith, published by Parkstone International.

The history of Mughal painting begins with the name of Mir Sayyid Ali. In the year 1525 Babur set out upon the conquest of India, a land, however, of which he did not conceive highly. Five years later he was dead. In 1546 Humayun, his son, was deprived of his empire by the Afghan, Sher Shah, and until his final victory in 1555 existed as a landless refugee. One year of this period was spent at the Safavid court at Tabriz, where Shah Tahmasp now ruled. Bihzad was dead, but the work of a young painter, Sayyid Ali, was already attracting attention. His father, Mansur of Badakshan, who was also a painter, was a contemporary of Bihzad’s. Another painter of growing reputation also attracted the notice of the exiled emperor; this was Abdul Samad.

In 1550 both these artists joined Humayun’s court at Kabul. It was here that Mir Sayyid Ali was commissioned to supervise the illustration of the romance of Amir Hamzah (Dastan-e-Amir Hamza) in twelve volumes of a hundred folios each. Sixty of these illustrations painted in tempera colours on prepared cotton cloth are in Vienna, and twenty-five of them in the Indian Gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. They must probably be attributed to the artists of the imperial court working under Mir Sayyid Ali, rather than to that painter himself. After Humayun’s death Mir Sayyid Ali continued to work at the court of Akbar, and also performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The style of these early Mughal paintings is, of course, largely Safavid, but it is evident that modification and developments have already taken place. It is said that Bihzad added skill in portraiture to the art of painting; portraiture is further developed in Mughal painting. Also a greater use is made of relief and the range of colours is larger and more striking. There is something, too, about the use of flower and foliage that is un-Persian and wholly Indian. A certain simplicity and breadth of design dominates the wealth of detail; the microscopic rendering of costume and accoutrements, textile hangings and architectural details is doubly delightful in so much as it is never obtrusive.

Such paintings on prepared fabric are common in India. It appears that paper itself was rare, or at any rate that large sheets were hard to obtain.

Summing up the technique and quality of early Mughal painting, it may be said that it was an offshoot of the Safavid school, the handiwork of artists trained in the school of Bihzad. However, as has been said, the local character of the detail as shown in the portrayal of the Indian countryside and of its flowers and foliage is proof of complete acclimatization, promising vigorous development.

Akbar succeeded to the insecure throne of his father when still a boy with this distinction: that whereas Babur and Humayun were rulers in a foreign land, he was native born. The culture of his court did not merely reflect at a distance the splendour of Bukhara and Samarkand. The building of Fatehpur Sikri in 1569 heralded a new era of Indian rule. And after the architects, masons, and sculptors had done their work, painters were called in to decorate the walls of the public halls and private apartments. It has been said that Mughal miniature-painting are little wall-paintings, a statement which tends to be confusing, since neither branch of Mughal painting has anything in common with the ancient Indian schools of painting of Ajanta and Gujarat, except certain inclinations to bright colouring and fine line-drawing which seem temperamentally inherent in Indian artists.

In Persia and India, as in China, calligraphy was regarded as a fine art worthy of the most serious study, and masters of it enjoyed fame throughout Asia like that of great painters in Europe. They were careful to sign and date their works, which were eagerly collected by connoisseurs. Abul Fazl gives a list of calligraphic experts, among whom in Akbar’s time the most eminent was Muhammad Husain of Kashmir, who survived the emperor for six years. Many of the albums in the London collections containing ‘miniatures’ include hundreds of specimens of beautiful writing in various styles and of different periods, which often seem to have been more valued than the drawings and paintings associated with them. Abul Fazl enumerates eight calligraphical systems as current during the sixteenth century in Iran (Persia), Turan (Turkistan), India, and Turkey, distinguished one from the other by differences in the relative proportion of straight and curved lines, ranging from the Kufic with five-sixths of straight lines to the Nastalik, Akbar’s favourite script, with nothing but curved strokes.

The forms of the Arabic alphabet used for writing Persian, although not distinctly reminiscent of pictorial hieroglyphs, as the Chinese characters are, lend themselves readily to artistic treatment, and even Europeans may understand to some extent the high technical skill of the masters of the calligraphic art, and admire the beauty of their productions. But full enjoyment and appreciation are possible only to persons familiar with the character from infancy and sensitive to all the associated ideas.

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