Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c20.46

c20.46

From a review of the official celebrities, let us turn to a few of the great savants of the East whose lineaments have been preserved by the skill of the Mughal painters. Of these none can be more interesting than that of the illustrious Persian writer, Sa‘di, whose weather-stained features stand out with singular force in this long series of portraits of eminent people from Persia and Hindustan. It is good to look on the philosopher in the flesh, so to speak, and to call to mind some of the wise sayings of the ‘nightingale of the groves of Shiraz’, as his contemporary, Jami, generously called him. With no little truth it has been said that what Shakespeare is to the West, so Sa‘di is to the East, as his writings are known, read, and quoted all over the orient and many other countries besides. One’s gratitude therefore goes out to the nameless Mughal painter who has presented us with the likeness of such a remarkable man in such an artistic form. It may be noted that Sa‘di died some three hundred years at least before the picture reproduced on Plate LXI, Fig. 1, was painted, but its very excellence is not the least convincing proof of its authenticity, as it is no doubt a copy of a drawing from life made when the great writer was at the height of his fame. For Sa‘di matured late, after numerous adventures in many different countries, and the marks of his vicissitudes are most truthfully recorded in the outlines of his face and the spareness of his figure. Born in Shiraz towards the end of the twelfth century, and educated at Baghdad, he left home and began his wanderings at an early age. On an expedition to Palestine he was taken prisoner by the Crusaders, and forced to labour, with the dregs of the Levant, in the fosse at Tripoli. After a series of romantic experiences he was eventually released and began a pilgrimage, sometimes as a soldier and on occasion as an ordinary traveller, to many of the countries of the East, including a visit to India. When past middle age he settled down in the city of his birth, to devote himself to those compositions which soon placed him among the great ones. Of his many works, the Gulistan, or ‘Garden of Roses’, is the most widely read, mainly because of the many wise observations on life in general that it includes in its four bābs, or ‘gateways’. ‘They asked me’, he writes, ‘of whom didst thou learn manners?’ I replied: ‘From the unmannerly. Whatever I saw them do which I disapproved of, that I abstained from doing.’ The picture shows him as one who would live up to that ideal, an old man—he lived to a great age, a hundred and eight years, it is said—but he stands erect and alert, looking the world squarely in the face, lean in body as would become a philosopher and a hardy traveller. Through the deep marks left by years of privation and peril, furrowed by the winds of the desert and of the sea, gleams a kindly sympathetic expression, while the long, tapering, sensitive hands add just that note of refinement which is required to complete the whole. It is doubtful whether in all the long series of Mughal portraits there is another equal to this.