Mughal Painting

The Mughal Empire of India was a powerful Turko-Islamic state of the Indian subcontinent, which lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. During its heyday, it encompassed the territorial region of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as some areas of Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iran, and Nepal. The Mughal Empire was founded by Tamerlane’s descendant Muhammad Babur in the sixteenth century, his son Humayun and grandson Akbar. At its peak, the empire comprised about 150 million people. Many of the most magnificent monuments, palaces, and mosques in the region date from the Mughal period, including the Taj Mahal. The Mughal painting was confined mostly to courtly miniatures, book illustration, or architectural ornamentation. Examples survive from Akbar’s illuminated Hamzanama manuscript and the Jahangirnama.

Brief History

While the first heads of the Mughal Empire, Babur and Humayun, conquered large areas of India, Akbar was the one to secure the Mughal Eempire as such. The Mughal Empire became rich from international trade with Europeans, Asians, and the Ottoman Empire. Akbar welcomed people from all religions, built a new capital, and became a great patron of the arts. The Mughal style combines Iranian and Central Asian traditions with those of Muslims and Hindus in India. In time, it incorporated Persian and European elements as well. In the Mughal Empire, paint was used as architectural ornamentation as well as in murals and portraits. Examples of incised painting can be seen in many Mughal era buildings.

According to scholars, Mughal painting and illustration became particularly refined in the seventeenth century, during the rule of Jahangir. During the reign of Akbar, painting had been a collaborative endeavor; Jahangir, however, continued his forbears’ tradition of keeping a painting workshop at court, but preferred artists to work individually. Despite the Muslim ban on figurative images, Jahangir loved realistic depictions of plants, animals, and people, and encouraged the adoption of European themes. As did his predecessors, Jahangir also commissioned the creation of lavishly illustrated books.

Aurangzeb, who followed more rigorous Muslim tenets, dismissed court painters, which marked the beginning of the end for Mughal painting. The Mughal style in painting survived as Mughal artists moved to other Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu courts in India and Asia, where they intermingled with other artistic styles and eventually created new schools of painting.

Overview

As a court-based painting style, Mughal painting’s development is usually studied according to the rule of its emperors: Humayun (1508–1556), Akbar (1542–1605), Jahangir (1569–1627), and Shah Jahan (1592–1666), after which it went into decline, enjoying a brief revival in the eighteenth century.

In the beginning, Mughal painting was a based on team work, created by groups of artists who specialized in specific areas such as portraiture, botanical drawing, gold leaf work, and coloring. Court artists usually worked in imperial workshops or ateliers.

Mughal paintings were characterized by their courtly elegance, based on a flat perspective typical of the Persian style, combined with the naturalism of the Indian tradition. Several themes were popular in Mughal painting, with those that would please the monarchs and aristocracy, such as hunting and court scenes, fables, historic battles and epics, portraits, gardens, and ornamental flora and fauna, in the majority. The Mughal school began to flourish in the court of the second Mughal emperor, Humayun, who upon returning to India from his Persian exile, took with him painters Mir-Sayyid and Abd-us-Samad. These became the founders of the Mughal tradition of miniature painting and among the first members of the imperial painting workshop at the Mughal court.

Mughal painting expanded during the rule of Akbar. Hundreds of artists worked in the imperial atelier under the direction of master painters. Akbar enjoyed storytelling and mythology, and promoted topics based on Persian fables and the Sanskrit epics The Ramayana and Mahabharata. During this period, paintings became more naturalistic, with dynamic figures such as animals depicted in movement. One of the most important works during Akbar’s period was a series of miniatures for the Persian Dastan of Amir Hamzah, or the Hamzanama. Akbar’s Hamzanama is a huge manuscript, which took the workshop fourteen years to complete and included 1,400 illustrations, of which two hundred have survived.

Akbar’s successor, Jahangir, was a great patron of the arts and a critic. During his reign, the Mughal painting style reached its peak, developing a delicate brushwork and a preference for subtler colors rather than the more vivid hues of the previous eras. Jahangir showed a marked inclination for naturalistic renderings of animals and flora, as well as biographical portrayal’s, such as the Jahangirnama, or Life of Jahangir. Court painters Abu-al Hasan, who was trained by the Jahangir himself, and Ustad Mansur, who specialized in flora and fauna, won particular acclaim during this era.

The court painters of Shah Jahan continued the painterly tradition of Jahangir, yet developed a marked tendency towards elegant but stiff depictions of courtly life, salons, and gardens. In fact, Shah Jahan was much more interested in architecture than in painting. After Shah Jahan’s rule, during the reign of his successor, Aurangzeb (1618–1707), courtly patronage of painting ended. The Mughal painting tradition continued supported by other patrons and in other courts, but it inevitably declined. It was briefly revived during the rule of Emperor Muhammad Shah (1719–1748), and effectively disappeared after his death, giving way to other art styles that evolved from the Mughal tradition, such as Rajasthani and Pahari painting.

Bibliography

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Guy, John, and Jorrit Britschgi. Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. Print.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Art of the Mughals after 1600." Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. 2000. Web. 25 May 25 2015.

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Suganda, Peevri. The Mughal Emperors. Amazon Digital, 2014. Kindle file.