Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c19.18

c19.18

In those pictures where the use of the architectural setting was denied him, the Mughal painter often relied on an elliptical arrangement, the principal figure or object being more or less central, while the secondary elements are grouped around following the lines of an oval. An example of this may be seen in the frontispiece, where the emperor is in the middle while his officials and attendants form an irregular ovoid shape around him; such a scheme is particularly noticeable in the picture of the lion hunt shown on Plate XLII, which is a record of an actual experience, and is fully described by Jahangir in his memoirs. All translations of this work, however, erroneously state that the animal of this adventure was a tiger, while the picture proves conclusively that it was a lion. Lions are now extinct in India, except for a few maneless specimens preserved in Kathiawar, but in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they were so numerous as to be a source of great danger to all those travelling in Hindustan. It is related that Jahangir and his courtiers used to ride these beasts down, and kill them ‘with their bows and carbines and launces’.¹ In all the *shikār* scenes of the Mughals the lion is represented as the animal of their choice, pictures of tigers being extremely rare. In referring to the incident of this miniature Jahangir writes: