Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c20.61.1

c20.61.1

A study of a large number of Mughal portraits shows that these resolve themselves into two definite methods of representation, one in which the features are depicted in rigid profile, and the other in which they are drawn in what is known as the three-quarter face. It would be consistent with the growth of the art if the former were the earlier, and the latter the later products of the portrait painter’s brush. The facts, however, serve rather to indicate that the reverse was the case, for the two styles emerge at the same time, progress side by side, and in the end the rigid profile ousts the three-quarter view and becomes the accepted method of depicting the features in all the later portraiture. An example of the two styles will be seen on Plate LXI, Fig. 1, presenting the conventional profile, while Fig. 2 shows the more natural three-quarter view. A probable explanation of the parallel course of the two methods is that the one was the result of the Persian, and the other of the Indian tradition. In the works of the Persian schools a figure with an exact side-face was rarely depicted; it was the artist’s practice, even in the most abstract or conventional representations of the human form, to draw the features in a three-quarter position. On the other hand it is unusual to see in any collection of indigenous Indian pictures, as for instance in the Rājput style, the face drawn from any other point of view except that of exact profile.