Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c22.28

c22.28

There seems little doubt that one of the means by which the art of miniature painting was conveyed from Persia to India took the form of tracings. Paper stencils of famous Safavid pictures were brought to the Mughal court, and from these the Indian painters executed copies. The outlines and general design were fixed by the transfer, but the scheme of colouring was left very much to the taste of the copyist. Nevertheless the latter was helped not a little by a method devised by the tracer for conveying even the colour scheme to his brother artist however distant. On different parts of his tracing the former made small dabs of colour, each according to the local colour of the original, as for instance a red dab for the coat, green for the turban, and so on, so that the copyist would at least have a fair idea of the general scheme. Fig. 1 on Plate LXXI is a tracing of a portrait of the Amir Timur, which has been treated in this manner, the small marks of the colour being distinctly discernible in the reproduction. Occasionally transfers are forthcoming in which the colours, instead of being communicated by brush marks, are written in minute characters on the different parts of the drawing.