Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c22.40

c22.40

The foregoing describes the ordinary method by which the Mughal painter obtained his results, but that there were frequent variations of the process goes without saying. In sketching, especially in portraiture, the first white priming was often omitted, the painting being executed directly on the surface of the paper. One style of painting, known as *garah*, practised more in the later stages of the art, consisted in encrusting parts of the picture with real seed pearls, and flakes of precious stones, similar to the *nouches* of the fourteenth-century Italian pictures, such embellishments being applied to the head ornaments, draperies, and other ornamental accessories. Water, without the addition of colour, was used for some purposes, a method referred to as *ābīna*. For instance, a sketch would be drawn in with a brush charged with water only, which when dry would leave a watermark impression as a guide for the subsequent painting. Another very delicate effect is said to have been obtained by the Kashmiri painters. They allowed water to stand until it had completely evaporated, leaving a slight sediment, which they used as a background tint to the profile of a portrait, as it left a faint but charming contrast of tone between the flesh colour and the ground. Many of the Indian pigments were extracts of minerals, but some were of a vegetable origin. In the early Safavid and Mughal pictures the deep strong blue was undoubtedly azurite, a natural ore of copper obtained from a ‘pocket’ which existed in Hungary in possession of the Turks during the fifteenth century. After a time this deposit was worked out, and its place was then taken in the later miniatures by a lapis lazuli (*lājward*) imported from Badakshan, now in Afghan territory. Indigo (*nīl*), a local vegetable product, found a place among the blues in the Indian painter’s palette, while of reds he had a wide range, two of the most useful being red ochre (*gerū*) and Indian red (*hurmachī*), both of which are extracted from oxide of iron found plentifully in the neighbourhood of Jabalpur in the Central Provinces. Lake was prepared from lac, the product of the insect responsible for shellac, too well known to need description. Cochineal was also the basis of one of the reds after its discovery in the year 1518, but before then *kirmīs*, a pigment obtained from the *Coccus indicus* or *ilicis*, an insect found in Persia, was used.¹ But the red par excellence of the painters of the Middle East, and one which figures prominently in most of the pictures of the Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal schools, is vermilion, a crude cinnabar or sulphide of mercury known as *shangarf*. Among the yellows were chrome and ochre, the last named being made from a soft saponaceous earth found near Multan in the Punjab, hence the common name for it is *Multanī mittī*. The well-known Indian yellow (*peorī*) is euxanthonate of magnesium, and orpiment (*hartāl*) is a sulphide of arsenic, while one of his yellows the Indian painter extracted from the flowers of the *dhāk* (*Butea frondosa*)