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Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Rāmāyaṇa and Other Illustrated

Manuscripts of 'Abd al-Raḥīm

Author(s): John Seyller

Source: Artibus Asiae. Supplementum, Vol. 42, Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Rāmāyaṇa and Other Illustrated Manuscripts of 'Abd al-Raḥīm (1999), pp. 2-7+9- 63+65-249+251-291+293-339+341-344

Published by: Artibus Asiae Publishers

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1522711

-Akbar placed great importance on translating Hindu works of literature to promote social harmony between Hindus and Muslims (14-15)

- Artists were NOT usually named, and even though they had a lot of different patrons through the 15th and 16th c., they didn’t have a lot of variation in style. (16)

- Paintings were a series of loose-leaf pages, always horizontal orientation, and they were “placed between decorated wooden covers, but not otherwise bound.” Images became more important than the words on the paintings over the course of the 15th c., until there was only a short caption over or under the painting and verses on the reverse side of the painting (16)

- Humayun establishes two Persian artists, Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, and they bring persian influence into the Indian art, like geometric framework, fine draftsmanship, different ways of composition, and stock Persian figures, but there were influences of indigenous Indian art too (17-18)

- “Mughal figures seem more animated than their Persian or Indian counterparts, an effect achieved primarily through a set of increasingly explicit and individualized facial expressions, and secondarily through ever more demonstrative poses and gestures. Mughal artists also were inclined to temper the Persian predilection for brilliant, pure hues with earth-ier tones and rudimentary modeling” (18)

- “In the sixteenth century, a number of Mughal artists had absorbed some European conventions for the rendering of volume and pictorial depth, and had conveyed the usefulness of such devices to some of their fellow artists.” (19)

- During Akbar and Jahangir’s rule, “ workshop grew from approximately thirty painters at the time of the colossal Hamzandma pro ject of circa I557-72 to about 130 artists by the mid 1590’s.” (20)

- “Certain artists were usually charged with the design of illustrations, while the actual application of colors was given over to less accomplished or more junior members of the atelier. Visual evidence suggests that master artists also had a hand in the most important details of the painting, which seem to have included some faces, although extended ascriptions also attest that on occasion this duty fell to still other artists who specialized in portraiture.” (21)

- “Certain types of texts, such as the dynastic histories and Hindu religious texts that dominated the I58os and I590s, were habitually large-scale undertakings, both in the number and size of illustrations. Persian poetical texts were almost always smaller affairs, usually decorated with fewer but more refined images produced by artists working alone. Multiple copies were made of both types of texts, occasionally with obvious differences in quality. These distinctions of subject and quality did not correspond to further ones involving choices in overall style, as we will see that they did in sub-imperial painting. Instead, imperial painters involved in every kind of project availed themselves of the most recent developments in style, with the often markedly different levels of success apparently depending primarily on the amount of time and talent they were able to invest.” (21)

- “ The formal changes in painting produced during the last thirty years of Akbar's reign built upon earlier developments. Artists began to create pockets of deep space in the upper reaches of the compositions described earlier by employing an abruptly graduated figure scale and the European device of atmospheric perspective, which reduced distant ranges of tiny trees to tints of blue and green; by the 1590os, these areas were integrated regularly with the foreground and middleground, in which the action transpired. Mughal painters also continued to elaborate the volumetric rendering of form, particularly in clothing and architecture, and expanded the range of facial expressions.” (21)

- Once Jahangir ascended to the throne, Persian subjects and style eclipsed traditional Hindu styles and subjects again. Naturalism was really popular, and so were paintings of the emperor, which in many cases were pretty much propaganda (22).

- Akbar supported painting against the traditional Muslim zealots of his kingdom (23)

- Non-royals wanted paintings, so artists started popping up outside the court to make popular works, that were lower quality (23-24)

- It’s hard to trace Imperial Mughal art to specific artists (23)

- There’s a pretty clear distinction between paintings for royals, which were high quality, and those for non-imperial people, which weren’t (25)