Hashim
Portrait of Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, from the Shah Jahan Album
A Deccan sultan, painted for a Mughal album.
- Artist
- Hashim
- Date
- c. 1620 (portrait); calligraphy on the reverse 1534 or later
- Medium
- Ink, opaque watercolour and gold on paper
- Where it is
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (55.121.10.33)
- Kind
- Deccani painting, Mughal painting
Ibrahim Adil Shah II, who ruled Bijapur from 1580 to 1627, stands alone against a pale green ground, dressed in white, a sword held upright before him. There is no throne, no court, no landscape: only a strip of flowers at his feet and a wide gold margin around the picture.
The painter, Hashim, is thought to have worked in the Deccan before joining the Mughal studio around 1620. The firm outlines and the colour are read as traces of that earlier training; the close attention to the face is Mughal. The page was mounted in the album Shah Jahan assembled, with older calligraphy by Mir Ali Heravi on the other side of the leaf.
The sitter was a musician as well as a king. He wrote poems about his wife and his tanpura, and the Kitab-i Nauras, a book on music, is his. His court gave the Dakhni language equal standing with Persian.
