A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s1.26

c20.s1.26

A remarkable set of twenty-four large paintings on cotton, in Mongol style, preserved in the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, seems to have been produced in Kashmīr about the middle of the sixteenth century before Akbar took measures to encourage painting after the Persian manner. These cotton paintings, bought in Kashmīr for low prices by Sir Purdon Clarke, are said to have been illustrations of a manuscript book of stories which has not been preserved or identified. The subjects, comprising many battles and scenes of bloodshed, are often repulsive. No. 5 shows a man being thrown from a window and caught by a horseman below. The most pleasing and best preserved composition is No. 15, which represents a central garden plot with conventional banyan-trees and a highly decorated palace in the Persian style; cranes are seen flying above. The rocky scenery found in all, or almost all, the pictures is connected with Kashmīr in one case by the introduction of black bears, and with India in two cases by the insertion of banyan-trees. These works may be conjectured to have been executed in Kashmīr between A. D. 1540 and 1551, when that country was ably ruled by Bābar's cousin, Haidar Mirzā Dughlat, the accomplished author of the *Tārīkh-i-Rashīdī*. They may be compared with the two big pictures on paper—the largest Indo-Persian compositions known—measuring 2 feet 8 inches by 2 feet 2 inches, which formed part of the illustrations of the *Romance of Amīr Hamzah Sāhib Kirān*, probably from the brush of Mīr Saiyid Ali of Tabrīz, the illustrator of that work, as recorded by Abūl Fazl. Possibly the South Kensington pictures may be concerned with the same story. Quaint representations of fights with black bears are also found in the B. M. MS. Or.