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“Patna's Drawings” Album

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“Patna's Drawings” Album Mughal miniatures share these basic characteristics, but they also incorporate interesting innovations. Many of these deviations results from the fact that European prints and art objects had been available in India since the establishment of new trading colonies along the western coast in the sixteenth century. Mughal artists thus added to traditional Persian and Islamic forms by including European techniques such as shading and at- mospheric perspective. It is interesting to note that Eu- ropean artists were likewise interested in Mughal paint- ing—the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn collected and copied such works, as did later artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and William Morris. These images continued to interest westerners in the Victorian era, during the period of Art Nouveau, and even today. [For a demon- stration of Persian miniature painting, see http://vimeo. com/35276945.] The DepicTion of The RuleR in Mughal MiniaTuRe painTing While Humayun was largely responsible for the im- portation of Persian painters to India, it was under Ak- bar that Mughal miniature painting first truly flourished. Akbar maintained an imperial studio where more than a hundred artists illustrated classical Persian literary texts, as well as the Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic that the emperor had translated into Persian from its original Sanskrit. Akbar also sponsored various books describing his own good deeds and those of his ancestors. Such books were expansive—some were five hundred pages long, with more than a hundred miniature paintings illustrat- portrait of the emperor shahjahan, enthroned, ing the text. It is here that we see the first concentrated from the “patna’s Drawings” album. focus on painted imagery dedicated to the Mughal rul- ers, and where the standards for such images are firmly established. The “Patna’s Drawings” Album, created un- when Nadir Shah of Persia sacked New Delhi, or in the der the rule of Akbar’s celebrated decendant Shahjahan, early nineteenth century, as antiquities dealers purchased is a wonderful later example of this type of presentation. what was left from the increasingly weakened Mughal The album is a continuation and fortification of the -Mu court. Over time, many of the albums were broken up, ghal miniature painting tradition celebrating kingship. augmented with additional materials, and rebound. Cer- The “paTna’s DRawings” albuM tainly many were lost as well. Albums such as the one of which our selected work, In general, such albums were of a consistent format the image of Shahjahan, is a part were generally made by and style. The book was introduced with imperial seals royal commission.37 Called muraqqa, they were intended and calligraphy pages, noting and hailing the emperor to serve as private luxury works, to be leafed through for whom it was commissioned. The albums included and enjoyed at leisure by the emperor and his friends and portrait miniatures of the ruler, his ancestors, and other family. Such objects would have originally been preserved members of the imperial family, as well as various dig- in the imperial collection and passed along through gen- nitaries and holy men. These portraits were arranged erations. Considering their purpose and provenance, it according to the hierarchy of the court and were often is quite surprising that only one mid-seventeenth-cen- supported by additional calligraphy elements. Many al- tury imperial album of paintings and calligraphies has bums also included natural history studies, particularly remained intact and in its original binding. The British botanical imagery. Such foliate decoration was also often Library holds this album, which was commissioned by seen in the borders of the various folio pages. Prince Dara-Shikoh in 1633 and presented to his wife According to the Bodleian Library which holds it, the Nadira Banu Begum in 1642. All of the other royal al- “Patna’s Drawings” Album includes a total of forty-one bums eventually left the imperial library, either in 1739 paintings, largely from the period of Shahjahan’s reign 74 USAD Art Resource Guide • 2015-2016.
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