A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s3.7

c20.s3.7

The leading technical merit of the best Mughal drawings, whether mere outline sketches, or elaborately coloured and gilt pictures, is the unsurpassed mastery over line displayed by the artists. All Asiatic pictorial art relies on the treatment of lines for its effects, and not on the more complex combinations of the modern European painter. Mr. Havell justly observes that 'the Mogul artist, with his brush, could draw lines with the delicacy and firmness of the etcher's needle-point'; and that 'the wonderful distinction, delicacy, and charm—and withal masterful strength—of the drawings . . . gives them all the strength of finished cameos'.² Almost any example of the good period will justify those observations. All fair criticism of the Mughal, or Indo-Persian, work must start from the fact that every picture, however gorgeous it may be, is essentially a line drawing, based on a firmly sketched outline. Sometimes the outline was never filled in, and certain compositions in that kind, although exceedingly slight in substance, are among the most charming. When the pernicious practice of dividing the work on one small picture between several collaborators was adopted, it is only the outline draughtsman who can claim credit as an original artist. Mere filling in with colours and gold, however well done, is the business of a skilled artisan rather than of a true artist.