Mid 16th to 19th century; the great years under Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan · Northern India, at the Mughal imperial court
Mughal painting
Painting made for the Mughal emperors, first as book illustration and then as single pages kept in albums. It began with Persian masters and became its own thing: a court that wanted to see real faces, real birds and real flowers.
How to recognise it
- Heads in strict profile, bodies turned half towards the viewer
- Close, naturalistic studies of animals, birds and flowers
- Court scenes full of individual, recognisable portraits
- Richly decorated borders around the central picture
- Opaque watercolour on paper; Akbar's Hamzanama, on cotton, is the big exception
Humayun spent his exile at the Safavid court in Persia and came home with two Persian painters, Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid Ali. They ran the imperial workshop in its first years. Under his son Akbar it became a large studio of Persian and Indian artists working on illustrated histories and epics. The Hamzanama alone, painted between about 1562 and 1577, ran to 1,400 cotton folios, each about 69 by 54 cm.
The style left its Persian roots quickly. Persian painting had little interest in likeness; Mughal painting put it at the centre, helped by European prints that reached the court. Akbar is said to have kept an album of portraits of his courtiers and consulted it when discussing appointments. By Jahangir’s time painters had specialities: Ustad Mansur for animals and flowers, Abu’l-Hasan and Bishandas for imperial portraits, Govardhan for holy men, musicians and eccentrics.
The great period covers three reigns, Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, a little over a century. After that the manner spread to other courts, Muslim and Hindu and later Sikh, where it grew bolder and less refined. Those pictures are usually called provincial or sub-Mughal.
What to look for
Start with the face. A good Mughal portrait is of someone in particular, usually in profile, and it looks like them. Look at the margins too: on the best album pages even the small figures in the border are character studies. Then look at fur, feathers and cloth, which were painted with real attention. Later courts borrowed these formulas freely, so “Mughal” on a label is a claim to check, not a description.
