Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c14.43

c14.43

entirely foreign his style was in its first stage. It is an illustration from a book, probably the Bāburnāma, as it depicts a court function with the Emperor Babur seated on his throne and surrounded by a number of friends and officials. The picture has every appearance of having been painted in India very shortly after the artist's arrival there, and may be dated about 1586. On the other hand it might have been executed a few years earlier, at Kabul while Farrukh was working under Akbar's brother, Mirza Muhammad Hakim, on whose death the painter was taken into the emperor's service. In either circumstance it is essentially a foreign production, having all the characteristics of the Timurid-Safavid style, except that the treatment of some of the figures in the foreground is suggestively Indian. As his subsequent pictures show, Farrukh was prepared to borrow from the art of India as much as he was also in a position to give.