Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c20.25

c20.25

To their artists the Mughal emperors seem to have communicated some of this instinct for seizing a likeness, which, combined with the natural skill of both Persians and Indians in portraiture, led to the most gratifying results. A brief review of some of the famous people who look out at us from the folios of the Mughals will show the material that the portrait painter selected for his art. From the realms of ancient literature he evolved fancy likenesses of Rustam, the Hercules of the East, of Bahram Gur, the mighty hunter, of Eraj, the knight *sans peur et sans reproche* of ancient Iran (Plate XIII), and many others who have figured in the mythical history of Persia. Coming nearer to his own time, and, accordingly, with more probability of truth in his representations, he pictured many of the heroes of the Mongol régime, who held sway over most of Asia in the thirteenth century of the Christian era. Among them may be seen Sultan Ogatay to whose might the great Chinese Empire succumbed, and whose timely death saved Europe from the Mongol hordes. Here also is the open countenance of Mangu Khan, with whom the decay of the empire of Chinghiz Khan began, and of his co-regent in the west, Hulagu, who, when he sacked and destroyed Baghdad in 1258, struck oriental civilization to the heart. Of the same period are preserved the features of those pillars of Iranian culture, the renowned mystic Jalal ud-Din Rumi, and his contemporary Sa‘di, as famed in poetry as he was in prose. But it is when we come to the period of the Timurids, in which the portraits are presumed to be more strictly authentic, that we can feel that the art of portraiture is on firmer ground. Hitherto the painter was no doubt executing his likenesses very largely from traditional records, rather than from pictures painted from the original person, although some of them certainly bear evidence of having been drawn from life. Of the Timurid dynasty we have almost every important representative, from the dreaded Amir himself (Plate IV, Fig. 1) directly down the line to his distant descendants on the Mughal throne of Hindustan. Apart from this collateral branch, however, the portrait gallery displays the visages of all the other members of the house of Timur, including the illustrious Shah Rukh, who so beautified Herat that for a time it was considered the most sumptuous city in the East; also his nephew, Baisunghar, whose refined disposition, and the patronage he extended to all painters, poets, and men of letters, did not prevent him from dying unknown and forgotten in A.D. 1499.