John Seyller, Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont, U.S.A., is an internationally acclaimed authority on Indian painting. During the past twenty-seven years he has published numerous insightful articles about various aspects of 16- and 17th-century Mughal paintings and manuscripts. Among his books are Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Ramayana and Other Illustrated Manuscripts of 'Abd al-Rahim (1999); Pearls of the Parrot of India: The Walters Art Museum Khamsa of Amir Khusraw of Delhi (2001); The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India (2002); and The Eva and Konrad Seitz Collection of Indian Miniatures: Mughal and Deccani Paintings (2010). He is currently collaborating with Jagdish Mittal on three other Museum catalogues: Pahari Paintings; Mughal Paintings, Drawings, and Islamic Calligraphy; and Deccani Paintings.
Jagdish Mittal is an artist turned art collector and art historian. He is the Principal Trustee of the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, to which he and his wife, Kamla, gifted their unique art collection in 1976. In 1990, the Government of India awarded him the honour of Padmashri. Along with many research articles in prestigious publications, he has published Andhra Paintings of the Ramayana (1969); Sublime Delight Through Works of Art from Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art(2007); and Bidri Ware & Damascene Work in Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art (2011).
No other dynasty has dominated the Indian stage as the Mughal dynasty (1526-1857). The Mughals-whose name is an Arabicised form of the Persian name for Mongols-were a Central Asian people who traced both halves of their lineage to two celebrated conquerors, Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227) and Timur (1336-1405). At the end of the 15" century, they were still a minor power contending for rule in present-day Afghanistan and Transoxiana (the lands on both sides of the Oxus River). After assaults on Kabul and Samarqand, which the Mughals regarded as their ancestral homeland, Babur (1483-1530) made an initial venture into the northwestern part of present-day -day Pakistan Pak in 1505. In 1519, he followed this up with the first of four ever more determined campaigns, even bestowing on his newborn son the Turkish name Hindal ("Take Indial") to rally his troops. The decisive moment in the last of these came on 21 April 1526, when Babur defeated the vastly larger army of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi on the plains at Panipat north of Delhi. A new empire emerged with its capital at Delhi. After the death of Babur (r. 1526-30) and the succession of his son, the hapless Emperor Humayun (r. 1530-40, 1555-56), the initial Mughal territorial gains in northern India were soon reversed, and Humayun suffered the ignominy of being driven into exile into Iran for about a decade beginning in 1544. But Humayun eventually won back Kabul and Delhi, only to die accidentally in January 1556. His premature demise led to the accession of his thirteen-year-old but extremely capable son, Akbar (r.1556-1605), whose political acumen led him to grasp the advantages of a more inclusive attitude toward his new Indian subjects. The emperor forged alliances with powerful Rajput clans through royal marriages, abolished the poll tax on non-Muslims, and personally adopted many Indian customs, including vegetarianism on certain days of the week. Together with a series of successful military campaigns in Rajasthan, Bengal, Central India, the northern Deccan, and the northwest, this approach facilitated a rapid territorial expansion and consolidation of power, Akbar quickly established a painting atelier, dominated at first by six or seven émigré Iranian artists, but soon enlarged to fifty artists, nearly all of them native-born Hindus. Most recruits to the increasingly cosmopolitan atelier adopted Persian compositional and figure types and strove to approximate the palette and technical finish of Safavid painting, but inevitably brought with them some of the aesthetic sensibilities and formal elements of the indigenous Indian tradition. The growth in the size of the painting workshop fostered the development of bureaucratic mechanisms that ensured a relatively homogeneous workshop style for each project. It also produced an elaborate system of record keeping, whose primary feature was ascriptions written by clerks on the borders of manuscript illustrations. These document the work of as many as 130 artists, often specifying the role that each played in the collaborative effort of a team of two or three artists, and sometimes even prescribing the amount of time the artist was to spend on the painting. These records have allowed scholars to identify and track to a remarkable degree the incremental changes in the work of individual artists. The consistent naming of painters surely reflects the increased status of the artist, a trend also seen in late 16-century Safavid painting. The ranks of the imperial Mughal atelier contracted tremendously about 1600, apparently even before Prince Salim rebelled and set up a satellite court at Allahabad at that time. Many of the best artists followed the heir-apparent to Allahabad, and returned with him to the Mughal court proper upon his accession in 1605, when he took the name Jahangir ("World-Seizer"). Under Jahangir, a connoisseur who boasted of his ability to distinguish one artist from another even in details as small as an eyebrow, the emphasis in painting shifted from copiously illustrated manuscripts to fewer and more refined individual paintings that were gathered into albums. Many artists such as Bichitr (cat. no. 5) brought their works to an unprecedented level of technical brilliance, and complemented album pages filled with exquisite calligraphic specimens and illuminations with figural and floral borders so astonishing that they rival independent paintings. Although biographical information about artists is rare-and was usually limited to their patrimony-their individual styles truly did become ever more distinctive, partly because it became standard practice to work alone (e.g., cat. no. 5). Together with issues of patronage and chronology, the meticulous identification of the personal styles of scores of imperial Mughal artists has been a large part of the extensive scholarship of Mughal painting, and is a prominent feature of this catalogue. By contrast, former artists who were compelled to find employment with lesser patrons at the court (e.g., cat. no. 14), at provincial centres (cat. no. 16), or even in a commercial environment (cat nos. 7-10) mostly languished in anonymity. Away from the high demands and remuneration of the court, technical standards slackened and more indigenous elements were assimilated and generally came to the fore One crucial aspect of 16 and 17"-century Mughal painting is its fascination with European models, both for the power of its sacred imagery-especially of the Madonna (cat. nos. 11-12)-and as a source of many fresh visual ideas and techniques. Among these are a tempering of the traditionally brilliant palette of Persian and Indian painting, the limited use of crosshatching and contour shading to enhance figural volume, the complex layering of figures within architectural spaces, and the systematic diminution of forms and application of atmospheric perspective in a receding landscape. While Mughal artists employed these various devices to carve out discrete pockets of space, they were generally unable to combine them into a coherent pictorial space. One reason for this is that they ignored the illusionistic effects of light and shadow, an aspect of painting alien to both the Persian and Indian traditions. One exception is Payag, an early 17"-century artist who, responding to European examples, pioneered night scenes constructed around the light cast by a candle or fire (see cat. no. 4). The late 16th century saw the emergence of natural history painting and portraiture as major genres in Mughal painting. Animals are described carefully in illustrations of the natural history section of Babur's memoirs and in some illustrations of the history of Akbar's reign. But for a relatively short-lived period, approximately 1600-1660, and especially under the auspices of Jahangir, animals and plants became independent subjects of painting in their own right, an expression of a nascent empirical investigation of the natural world. The most majestic of the animal paintings and drawings depict the elephant, whose size, colour, and demeanour were evaluated carefully at the Mughal court. In his memoirs Jahangir mentions more elephants than painters by name, and surprisingly discusses the virtues of various classes of elephants in much greater detail than any manuscript or painting. Other animals were regarded as such amazing phenomena of nature that an artist or a team of artists made multiple portraits of the creature within a matter of days, as is the case with zebras and turkeys by the famed animal painter Mansur. Many painters built up their visual repertoire by sketching even familiar animals such as dogs and bulls from multiple or unfamiliar angles, though very few of these studies survive (cat. nos. 21-22). Birds were commonly sprinkled throughout the text of fine literary manuscripts as decoration, and pigeons and similar species were sometimes presented in small paintings as a series of colourful pairs. The sport of falconry, long fashionable in West Asia, fostered the depiction of favourite individual raptors. And discrete botanical specimens, both exotic and domestic, were suddenly deemed worthy of depiction in independent paintings (cat. nos. 3, 24-25). The most important manifestation of this groundswell of empirical observation in Mughal art was portraiture, a genre that arose in the 1580s. Using a consistent format of a standing figure in profile view, artists recorded the facial features of individuals with a level of specificity never before seen in the Persian and Indian traditions. According to the chronicler Abu'l-Fazl, Akbar wished to use such likenesses to grant immortality to those who would inevitably pass from this realm of existence." Remarkably, Akbar did not make this quest for enduring fame his own exclusive right, but instead ordered his atelier to record all his grandees. Nonetheless, implicit in his directive is the presumption that it was the emperor's prerogative to bestow visual immortality. Mughal artists tended to overlook their subjects' inner realities to dwell on their trappings, an approach that suggests the invariable appeal of representations of luxury items, the surface-oriented nature of their empirical observation, and perhaps even a simplified, status-driven conception of personal identity at the time. The psychological dimension increased in the latter part of the reigns of Jahangir and his son and successor, Shahjahan (r. 1627-58), and especially in figures outside the context of the court. Drawings such as cat. no. 19 reflect the custom of formal darbar (audience) scenes, in which the emperor would greet a prince or dignitary at court before ranks of nobles arranged according to a strict hierarchy. Whereas 16"-century Mughal court scenes tended to be populated with generic figures.
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