Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c20.17

c20.17

The art of portrait painting therefore was no innovation in India when the Mughal rulers began to form their school of miniaturists. But although they had at their command artists with whom portraiture was an ancient but living tradition, it was their own personal predilection for this phase of painting that led to the representation of likenesses becoming a feature of the Mughal school. The Mughal emperors themselves had a gift for descriptive portraiture, as may be seen in some of their writings. Babur in his *Memoirs* includes several crisp character sketches of different people of his time, which are to all intents and purposes equal to Mughal miniatures. He thus draws a pen picture of his own father in the following words: