Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c15.40

c15.40

Apart from being accurate reproductions of the scenes they were intended to represent, each of these miniatures includes a characteristic portrait of Jahangir himself, always of course showing the monarch to the best advantage. In every one of these he is shown with a golden halo, but even without this artificial accessory, which from this time invariably distinguishes the ruling monarch of the dynasty, Jahangir stands out by the intellectuality of his features as a man of mark. There are pictures of him at every age, from a babe to an elderly man, and in almost all these the same striking personality is discernible. The Mughal emperors owed their position as rulers of their vast territory mainly to the fact that they were mentally the superiors of those around them. We see this reflected in the portraits of all the leading members of the line, just as we notice its absence when the dynasty became effete. In spite of the signs of his failings, and they are written plainly in the weak modelling of his jaw and chin, Jahangir, except towards the end of his life, possessed an attractive appearance. Plate XVII, Fig. 2, shows him as a young prince, whose frank and open countenance was yet unblemished by dissipation, and untouched by anxiety. When in his prime, as in several pictures here presented, his chiselled features must have been a pleasure to the artist to reproduce. As he grew older these ever-truthful delineators did not omit those flabby folds that told only too well the tale of his self-indulgences. And at the last we see him, as in Plate XXI, an unfinished sketch, when illness and disappointment had hardened his expression, shadowed it with resentment, and made an old man of him before his time. It is, however, in some of the court pictures that one likes best to visualize this monarch, when, filled with the joy of life and happy in all things, he sits with kingly bearing on his golden throne, communicating some of his buoyant nature, which rarely failed, to those around him.