Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c14.16

c14.16

from his actions. At Tabriz he made the acquaintance of a young painter of the name of Mir Sayyid Ali, whose work even then was causing attention. As one of the illustrators of a sumptuous copy of *Nizāmī’s Khamsah*, he had been associated with some of the leading artists of the country, and his work was judged equal to theirs. One of his pictures is reproduced on Plate VI, the subject being an incident in the famous love story of *Laila and Majnun*, an Eastern romance which has been likened in some respects to Ariosto’s *Orlando Furioso*. In the foreground the emaciated form of the hero will be observed, at whom the village boys are energetically throwing stones to show their contempt for his impoverished condition. But the design is full of interesting details, some of which truthfully depict the different occupations of the people of that time. In its treatment it shows how completely Mir Sayyid Ali had absorbed the style of his older contemporaries and had already developed into a finished exponent of the Safavid school. The young artist’s training readily explains this. His father, Mir Mansur, who taught him the rudiments of his craft, was also a skilled painter, a native of Badakhshan. Hearing of the famous school at Tabriz, with Bihzad at its head, he took his young son with him and travelled thither, there to make his home. Both father and son thus came under the influence of Bihzad, working in the same atmosphere and assimilating much of his manner and technique. It is not difficult to picture the boy sitting near the leader of the Persian school, watching him lay in his backgrounds or outline his figures with such inimitable skill, and yearning to follow in his footsteps. Here as a younger man he learned to express himself not only by means of the brush but also in verse, for like Michelangelo and Rossetti, Sayyid Ali developed into a poet as well as a painter, and later, under the *takhallus*, or pen-name, of ‘Juda’i’, he lived to achieve no little fame. In the same city at this time there was also another rising artist, who likewise paid his respects to the exiled king. He was a man from Shiraz, by name Khwajah Abdus Samad, and as versatile as Sayyid Ali, for he too was an expert in two arts, having already made a reputation as a painter and a calligraphist. Added to these attainments, he was a man of some social position, his father being a Wazir to Shah Shuja‘, the Governor of Shiraz. To both these young and promising artists Humayun seems to have held out definite prospects of employment in his service as soon as he was in a position once more to maintain a court of his own.