Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c14.24.1

c14.24.1

The pictures of the Amir Hamzah, with a few others which have been preserved, reveal the character of the art of painting under the Mughals at this early stage. In the main it was Persian, an offshoot of the Safavid school, to which it showed a close affinity, as it was the handiwork of artists trained in the traditions of Bihzad. Mir Sayyid Ali’s illustrations of the Persian classic are very much in the style that he learnt as a young man in Tabriz. They are larger because of his patron’s somewhat grandiose ideas, and they are on cloth because, as explained elsewhere, paper in India was not easily obtained. Plate IX is another example of a painting executed in Hindustan towards the middle of the sixteenth century, and it is of the same general character. The man on horseback, a Turkoman in face and dress, is the Amir Shaikh Hasan Noyan, a *wāli* (official) of Baghdad, and the picture is sufficiently Persian in appearance to suggest that it might have been painted under the supervision of Sultan Muhammad himself in his studio at Tabriz. But a closer study shows that there is something in this work which is not Safavid; in some way it is reminiscent of the Rājput style, vaguely suggestive of an Indian environment. It is impossible not to admire the feeling of breadth in the landscape portion of this early example of painting under the Mughals, although the picture as a whole is very much more Persian than Indian.