Mughal Painting and Artistic Workshops

Babur, a Central Asian prince, established the Mughal dynasty in northern India in 1526; it reached its final collapse after the rebellion of 1857. Mughal rulers and courtiers commissioned paintings for books, albums and private collections. The imperial painting tradition is especially well documented under the emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Persian-language book traditions, South Asian artists and materials, and selected European prints met in court settings. A painting might tell a story, record a ruler or animal, display the patrons’ taste, or present an ideal of kingship; its subjects and arrangement reflect those purposes.

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From the court library to the painting workshop

Humayun, Akbar’s father, took refuge at the court of Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp before recovering power in north India. Artists and book specialists from Iranian cities entered Mughal service alongside painters trained in South Asia. Under Akbar, the kitabkhana, or House of Books, joined the royal library to the place where manuscripts were planned and produced. It was an organized department, not simply a room where an emperor kept books: a director selected texts and artists. Calligraphers, or skilled writers, copied the text; painters supplied pictures; illuminators and binders finished the pages.

The illustrated Akbarnama, Abu’l Fazl’s history of Akbar’s reign, shows how artists divided work. On one surviving manuscript, contemporary red-ink notes below each picture name one artist who planned the composition and another who filled the outlined scene with colour; a specialist sometimes painted the faces of leading figures. The Persian terms recorded for those roles are tarh, the design, and ‘amal, the execution or colouring. The collaboration let artists work on different parts of a large commission while following a shared plan.

Abu’l Fazl’s account of Akbar’s household describes oversight as well as craft. Works by painters were brought before the emperor each week by workshop officials and clerks; Akbar judged their workmanship and awarded gifts or increased salaries. The same account names master painters such as Mir Sayyid Ali, Abd al-Samad, Daswanth and Basawan. Abu’l Fazl wrote for the court, and his description emphasizes imperial taste and the salaried painters closest to Akbar.

Preparing a page and its colours

Book production required a sequence of practical jobs. A calligrapher copied the text and left blank spaces where the workshop director had planned pictures. A painter laid out a composition with a fine brush. In one method described for Islamic book workshops of the period, a design could be transferred from an earlier sketch with a pounce: the artist pricked small holes around the outline, laid the perforated sheet over the fresh page, then dusted charcoal through the holes to mark the image. The painter filled that guide with finely ground pigments mixed with a binder so they would adhere to the page. Illuminators and gilders added headings, borders and gold details; the sheets were burnished, or rubbed smooth with a stone or glass tool, and finally sewn and bound.

Paintings often used opaque watercolour, a dense water-based paint that covers the support, with gold for highlights or ornament. Mineral pigments could produce brilliant colours, though some were costly and others could fade or tarnish over time. The support varied with the commission. Akbar’s Hamzanama, a monumental illustrated cycle of tales about the hero Hamza, used unusually large painted sheets: pictures were made on cotton backed with paper, while the accompanying text was written on layered paper and cotton. Production is generally dated about 1562–1577. The enormous format and layered support made the book a special court project, unlike smaller paper folios made for other manuscripts and albums.

Illustrated histories and translated stories

Akbar’s court used painting to give selected histories and translated works a visual form. His grandfather Babur had written memoirs in a Turkic language; a Persian translation, completed in 1589 under the supervision of Abd al-Rahim, allowed Persian-reading courtiers to encounter the founder’s account of his life. An illustrated copy made about 1590 paired the translated narrative with scenes of journeys, gardens and events described in the memoir.

Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama recounted Akbar’s reign, including campaigns and court events. One manuscript covering events from 1560 to 1577 contains 116 paintings, and a contemporary librarian attributed each image to its makers. Siege pictures place attackers, defenders and equipment in carefully organized scenes; processions and audiences arrange the emperor and courtiers according to rank. The pictures help tell a court history, while also making the ruler visible as a central actor in it.

Translation brought new narratives into the workshop. Akbar’s Persian version of the Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic about rival branches of a royal family and their war, was called the Razmnama, or Book of War. Its painters adapted stories unfamiliar to many Persian-reading courtiers into visual scenes. Jesuit delegations, sent by a Catholic religious order, arrived from Portuguese India beginning in 1580 and showed Christian paintings and European prints at court. Mughal artists studied the images: some copied individual prints closely, while others adapted shading, depth or motifs within their own manuscript designs. A painting of Saint Cecilia made about 1600 by the artist Nini follows a European Christian print, showing how a particular image could cross languages and religious settings through court contact.

Portraits, animals and assembled albums

Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, prized individualized portraits and close observation of animals. In 1621, a delegation presented him with an African zebra. The painter Mansur recorded the animal on paper, and Jahangir added an inscription identifying Mansur and the circumstances of the gift. The page therefore served both as a study of an unfamiliar animal and as a record of diplomatic exchange and royal collecting.

A portrait could also provide a model for a larger court scene. The painter Manohar’s isolated portrait of the nobleman Mirza Ghazi was reused at the same scale in a garden assembly painting, where the figure was placed among Jahangir and his courtiers. Such reuse let artists maintain recognizable faces across images while changing clothing, colour and setting to suit a new composition. Other portraits idealized rulers through halos, precious dress or symbolic objects, presenting authority rather than an unposed likeness.

In a muraqqa, or album, a patron could have single paintings and calligraphy specimens mounted together within decorative borders. An album gathered images for looking and comparison rather than illustrating one continuous story. Jahangir began the collection later called the Shah Jahan Album; his son Shah Jahan added paintings, illuminations and calligraphic folios, and Aurangzeb later owned it. Its pages place contemporary Mughal work beside older Persian calligraphy, linking imperial collecting to the preservation and reuse of earlier art.

Albums could also revise political memory. Around 1630 the painter Murar altered a scene painted by Manohar about 1615: he replaced Jahangir’s head with Shah Jahan’s and changed the prince following the emperor into Shah Jahan’s son Dara Shikoh. The rest of the composition remained. By altering a few figures, the new patron reshaped the image’s dynastic message without commissioning an entirely new painting.

Artists on the move and changing patrons

The court itself travelled, and painters sometimes moved with princes and emperors. Around 1615–1618, Nanha painted the submission of the ruler of Mewar to Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, and included himself at work within the scene. This image connects political ceremony to the prince’s travelling entourage: the painter was present where the event and its intended audience were located. Jahangir’s own mobile court also carried artists, so pictures could be made far from the fixed royal libraries at Agra in India or Lahore in present-day Pakistan.

After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, imperial power weakened and regional rulers increasingly supported their own artists. The Persian ruler Nadir Shah’s sack of Delhi in 1739 accelerated the movement of painters to other courts. In Awadh, a north Indian region where governors known as nawabs became increasingly independent as Mughal authority fragmented, artists worked for new patrons in Faizabad and Lucknow, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India. Nidha Mal’s mid-eighteenth-century painting of a prince and women on a garden terrace carries forward late Mughal courtly composition for this regional setting. The last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was deposed by the British after the rebellion of 1857; a portrait of him made around 1855–1858 shows that court painting continued into the dynasty’s final years, even as imperial power had narrowed sharply.