Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c21.9

c21.9

The Jesuit Fathers had no doubt been previously told that an unfailing means of securing the support of the Mughal emperor was to bring with them many examples of European pictorial art. They came prepared, therefore, with a considerable number of paintings of saints and religious subjects, which seem to have been very well received; these also eventually led to much discussion between the members of the mission and Akbar and his priests. But the object by which the Fathers laid the greatest store, and one which they fondly hoped would be productive of the best results, was a magnificently bound copy of Plantyn’s Royal Polyglot Bible, printed in 1569–72 for Philip II of Spain. This they presented to the emperor with no little formality in March 1580. It consisted of eight large volumes, and was illustrated with a number of engravings by Flemish artists of the school of Quentin Matsys (1466–1531), including one who signs his drawings ‘P. Huys’. Akbar accepted the gift with evident signs of pleasure, and placed it in his imperial library, where it remained for fifteen years: it was then handed back to a later Jesuit mission which came to the court of the Mughal. There is little doubt that during the period that it was in the emperor’s keeping the artists studied the illustrations in this book just as carefully as they did those of the Persian schools, and the result of their study is plainly observable in some of their miniatures. Among its engravings were some pictorial maps displaying galleys and other mediaeval ships sailing through seas in which aquatic monsters disport themselves. Such subjects were entirely unknown to the Mughal painters, who had never seen the sea, and so when they had occasion to depict scenes of shipping they took the Flemish engravings as their guide. We are presented, therefore, in all the marine subjects of the period—and the Mughals seem to have taken a certain amount of pleasure in these on account of their unusual character—with high-prowed ships like the galleons of ancient days, moving over waters rippling with spiral waves among which swim many fearsome creatures, half crocodile and half fish. The relation of such painting to the plates in the Plantyn Bible, while not strongly marked, is, in this particular, sufficiently distinct to be more than a mere coincidence. But still further evidence of the use that Akbar’s artists made of the pictorial material from the West that was arriving in their midst is available. Shortly after the Jesuit priests had introduced the Mughals to their collections of religious art and examples of illustrated books, one of Akbar’s Kahar artists, Kasava-dasa, or Kesu the elder, began the preparation of a series of miniatures among which were included copies and imitations of Christian pictures. The whole, when finished, he had bound up in a *muraqqa‘* (album), which he presented with a dedication to the emperor in 1588.¹ Miniature copies of sacred pictures from Europe were not infrequently made by the Mughal painters during Akbar’s reign, and the practice became still more common under Jahangir. They are to be found in many collections of Indian painting, and a good specimen may be studied in the British Museum, Stowe Or. 16, folio 18. It depicts the ‘ Scoffing of Christ ’, and is a careful copy of a European original probably executed by a Hindu painter about 1625. Another picture of the same kind, a portrait of the Virgin, but with an Indian background, is in the Bodleian Library, O. A. 171 b, 16 v. Several miniatures, the subjects of which were similarly inspired, are in the Museum at Washington, U.S.A., having been collected by Colonel Hanna. Some of these, however, while appearing at first sight to be the Indian painters’ interpretations of Christian subjects are on closer investigation found to be purely Islamic in origin. Saints with halos, and angels with wings, are not unusual in Persian and Mughal art, being derived from another and older tradition.