Mughal painting is a style of miniature painting, used as either book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums (muraqqa), which originated during the Mughal period in the Indian subcontinent. It originated from Persian miniature which itself was influenced heavily by Chinese and European art, Mughal paintings also feature Indian and Islamic influences in its development. As the name suggests, these paintings evolved as well as developed during the rule of Mughal emperors in India, between the 16th to 19th century.
The Mughal emperors were Muslims and they are credited with consolidating Islam in the subcontinent, and spreading Islamic (and particularly Persian) art and culture as well as the faith.
Mughal painting immediately took a much greater interest in realistic portraiture than was typical of Persian miniatures. Animals and plants were the main subject of many miniatures for albums, and were more realistically depicted. Although many classic works of Persian literature continued to be illustrated, as well as Indian literature, the taste of the Mughal emperors for writing memoirs or diaries, begun by Babur, provided some of the most lavishly decorated texts, such as the Padshahnama genre of official histories. Subjects are rich in variety and include portraits, events and scenes from court life, wild life and hunting scenes, and illustrations of battles. The Persian tradition of richly decorated borders framing the central image (mostly trimmed in the images shown here) was continued, as was a modified form of the Persian convention of an elevated viewpoint.
The Mughal painting style later spread to other Indian courts, both Muslim and Hindu, and later Sikh, and was often used to depict Hindu subjects. This was mostly in northern India. It developed many regional styles in these courts, tending to become bolder but less refined. These are often described as "post-Mughal", "sub-Mughal" or "provincial Mughal".
Subjects Portraits
From fairly early the Mughal style made a strong feature of realistic portraiture, normally in profile, and influenced by Western prints, which were available at the Mughal court. This had never been a feature of either Persian miniature or earlier Indian painting. The pose, rarely varied in portraits, was to have the head in strict profile, but the rest of the body half turned towards the viewer. For a long time portraits were always of men, often accompanied by generalized female servants or concubines; but there is scholarly debate about the representation of female court members in portraiture. Some scholars claim there are no known extant likenesses of figures like Jahanara Begum and Mumtaz Mahal, and others attribute miniatures, for example from the Dara Shikoh album or the Freer Gallery of Art mirror portrait, to these famous noblewomen.Crill and Jariwala, 23-30Abid. Reign of Shah Jahan, portrait by Abid dated 1628; assembled late 17th century. Mirror Case With Portrait of Mumtaz Mahal. Freer Gallery of Art. F2005.4 The single idealized figure of the Riza Abbasi type was less popular, but fully painted scenes of lovers in a palace setting became popular later. Drawings of genre scenes, especially showing holy men, whether Muslim or Hindu, were also popular.
Akbar had an album, now dispersed, consisting entirely of portraits of figures at his enormous court which had a practical purpose; according to chroniclers he used to consult it when discussing appointments and the like with his advisors, apparently to jog his memory of who the people being discussed were. Many of them, like medieval European images of saints, carried objects associated with them to help identification, but otherwise the figures stand on a plain background.Crill and Jariwala, 66 There are a number of fine portraits of Akbar, but it was under his successors Jahangir and Shah Jahan that the portrait of the ruler became firmly established as a leading subject in Indian miniature painting, which was to spread to both Muslim and Hindu princely courts across India.Crill and Jariwala, 27–39, and catalogue entries
From the 17th century equestrian portraits, mostly of rulers, became another popular borrowing from the West.Crill and Jariwala, 68 Another new type of image showed the Jharokha Darshan (literally "balcony view/worship"), or public display of the emperor to the court, or the public, which became a daily ceremonial under Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, before being stopped as un-Islamic by Aurangzeb. In these scenes, the emperor is shown at top on a balcony or at a window, with a crowd of courtiers below, sometimes including many portraits. Like the increasingly large halos these emperors were given in single portraits, the iconography reflects the aspiration of the later Mughals to project an image as the representative of Allah on earth, or even as having a quasi-divine status themselves.Hansen, Waldemar, The Peacock Throne: The Drama of Mogul India, 102, 1986, Motilal Banarsidass Other images show the enthroned emperor having meetings, receiving visitors, or in durbar, or formal council. These and royal portraits incorporated in hunting scenes became highly popular types in later Rajput painting and other post-Mughal styles.
Another popular subject area was realistic studies of animals and plants, mostly flowers; the text of the Baburnama includes a number of descriptions of such subjects, which were illustrated in the copies made for Akbar. These subjects also had specialist artists, including Ustad Mansur. Milo C. Beach argues that "Mughal naturalism has been greatly overstressed. Early animal imagery consists of variations on a theme, rather than new, innovative observations". He sees considerable borrowings from Chinese animal paintings on paper, which seem not to have been highly valued by Chinese collectors, and so reached India.Beach, 32–37, 37 quoted
Illustrated books
In the formative period of the style, under Akbar, the imperial workshop produced a number of heavily illustrated copies of established books in Persian. One of the first, probably from the 1550s and now mostly in the Cleveland Museum of Art, was a Tutinama with some 250 rather simple and rather small miniatures, most with only a few figures. In contrast, Akbar's Hamzanama had unusually large pages, of densely woven cotton rather than the usual paper, and the images were very often crowded with figures. The work was "a continuous series of romantic interludes, threatening events, narrow escapes, and violent acts", supposedly telling the life of an uncle of Muhammad.Beach, 61 Akbar's manuscript had a remarkable total of some 1400 miniatures, one on every opening, with the relevant text written on the back of the page, presumably to be read to the emperor as he looked at each image. This colossal project took most of the 1560s, and probably beyond. These and a few other early works saw a fairly unified Mughal workshop style emerge by around 1580.
Other large projects included biographies or memoirs of the Mughal dynasty. Babur, its founder, had written a memoir in Chaghtai Turkic, which his grandson, Akbar had translated into Persian, as the Baburnama (1589), and then produced in four lavishly illustrated copies, with up to 183 miniatures each. The Akbarnama was Akbar's own commissioned biography or chronicle, produced in many versions, and the tradition continued with Jahangir's autobiography, Tuzk-e-Jahangiri (or Jahangirnama) and a celebratory biography of Shah Jahan, called the Padshahnama, which brought the era of the large illustrated imperial biography to an end, around 1650. Akbar commissioned a copy of the Zafarnama, a biography of his distant ancestor Timur, but though he had his aunt Gulbadan Begum write an account of his father Humayun titled 'Humayun Nama', no illustrated manuscript survives.
Volumes of the classics of Persian poetry usually had rather fewer miniatures, often around twenty, but often these were of the highest quality. Akbar also had the Hindu epic poems translated into Persian, and produced in illustrated versions. Four are known of the Razmnama, a Mahabharata in Persian, from between 1585 and . Akbar had at least one copy of the Persian version of the Ramayana, alongside other works like the Bhagavata Purana, Harivamsa, and Panchatantra.
Origins
Mughal court painting, as opposed to looser variants of the Mughal style produced in regional courts and cities, These were Hindu and Jain, and earlier Buddhist, and almost entirely religious. They existed mainly in relatively small illustrations to texts, but also mural paintings, and paintings in folk styles on cloth, in particular ones on scrolls made to be displayed by popular singers or reciters of the Hindu epics and other stories, performed by travelling specialists; very few early examples of these last survive. A vivid Kashmiri tradition of mural paintings flourished between the 9th and 17th centuries, as seen in the murals of Alchi Monastery or Tsaparang: a number of Kashimiri painters were employed by Akbar and some influence of their art can be seen in various Mughal works, such as the Hamzanama.
In contrast, Mughal painting was "almost entirely secular",Harle, 372 although religious figures were sometimes portrayed. Realism, especially in portraits of both people and animals, became a key aim, far more than in Persian painting, let alone the Indian traditions. There was already a Muslim tradition of miniature painting under the Sultanate of Delhi which the Mughals overthrew, and like the Mughals, and the very earliest of Central Asian rulers into the subcontinent, patronized foreign culture. These paintings were painted on loose-leaf paper, and were usually placed between decorated wooden covers. Although the first surviving manuscripts are from Mandu in the years either side of 1500, there were very likely earlier ones which are either lost, or perhaps now attributed to southern Persia, as later manuscripts can be hard to distinguish from these by style alone, and some remain the subject of debate among specialists.Titley, 161–166 By the time of the Mughal invasion, the tradition had abandoned the high viewpoint typical of the Persian style, and adopted a more realistic style for animals and plants.Titley, 161
No miniatures survive from the reign of the founder of the dynasty, Babur, nor does he mention commissioning any in his memoirs, the Baburnama.Losty, 12 Copies of this were illustrated by his descendants, Akbar in particular, with many portraits of the new animals Babur encountered when he came to India, which are carefully described.Titley, 187 However some surviving un-illustrated manuscripts may have been commissioned by him, and he comments on the style of some famous past Persian masters. Some older illustrated manuscripts have his seal on them; the Mughals came from a long line stretching back to Timur and were fully assimilated into Persianate culture, and expected to patronize literature and the arts.
The style of the Mughal school developed within the royal atelier. Knowledge was primarily transmitted through familial and apprenticeship relationships, and the system of joint manuscript production which brought multiple artists together for single works. In some cases, senior artists would draw the illustrations in outline, and more junior ones would usually apply the colors, especially for background areas. Where no artist names are inscribed, it is very difficult to trace Imperial Mughal paintings back to specific artists.
Development
After a tentative start under Humayun, the great period of Mughal painting was during the next three reigns, of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, which covered just over a century between them.
Humayun (1530–1540 and 1555–1556)