Snowy Pine (detail), early seventeenth century, attrib. to Kano Mitsunobu. Folding screen, one of a pair. Ink and colors on gold-leaf ground. 171 × 154 cm. Honen-in, Kyoto.
Though not the most talented painter in the Kano family (compare this painting to one by his adoptive brother on the opposite page), Kano Mitsunobu deserves credit for managing the Kano family workshop and positioning it for future glory.
The subject of this painting may reflect the prevalence of extreme winters during the Little Ice Age.
Eitoku’s second son showed some promise, but he clearly lacked Eitoku’s drive. Perhaps for this reason Eitoku adopted one of his pupils, who took the name Kano Sanraku. Artistically, Mitsunobu was overshadowed by his father; his brother Kano Naizen; his nephew Kano Tanyu (who would become one of the greatest Kano painters); his own pupil Kano Koi (who would train Kano Tanyu); his father’s adopted son, Kano Sanraku; and Sanraku’s adopted son, Sansetsu, among others. All of these painters would help to ensure the continuance of the Kano school, their lineages branching out wider and wider in a pyramidal family tree.
But Mitsunobu was not so inferior a painter as posterity has sometimes made him out to be. Unlike his father, he was a cautious and conservative painter, so he suffered by the comparison. But that was probably exactly the kind of work his age demanded. Not only did he give his patrons what they wanted, he also proved a capable manager. He steered the family atelier through a precarious period and left it stronger than ever.
Family workshops helped to stabilize the system of artistic patronage and production. It was difficult to be an independent artist without a support network. One who succeeded was Iwasa Matabei, who was the artistic equivalent of a ronin, or wandering masterless samurai. Iwasa’s father, Araki Murashige, had plotted the overthrow of his daimyo. After the revolt failed, Matabei took his mother’s name of Iwasa. Though he was trained in the traditions of the Tosa school, which looked to ancient Japan rather than China for models, he seems also to have studied with Kano Mitsunobu’s brother, Kano Naizan. He drifted to Edo, where he hung around the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter and painted its residents. His highly individualistic style, notable for women with oblong heads, plump cheeks, and delicate features (p. 112), is thought to have laid the foundations for the development of ukiyo-e, pictures of the “floating world.”
Ukiyo-e pictures were popular with commoners, but the warrior elite wanted grand, large-scale paintings that would testify to their wealth and influence. Mitsunobu secured commissions for large paintings to decorate the imperial palace and Osaka Castle even before the death of Eitoku. Hideyoshi called on him to decorate the Nagoya Castle that he had erected as a staging area for his invasion of Korea. He also painted the Shokoku-ji and Kodai-ji temples. He wisely arranged for his talented nephew Tanyu to be tutored by his prize student, Kano Koi. And he began to shift the Kano workshop to the new shogunate capital of Edo (present-day Tokyo).
Mitsunobu’s work is more delicate and restrained than his father’s. At their best his paintings are subtle, graceful, sinuous, and balanced. Other times they just seem a bit dull, at least by comparison to the Kano masters who preceded and followed him. Nonetheless, Mitsunobu served admirably as a bridge between those greater artists, and he played an essential role in the development of what would come to be the dominant school of Japanese painting.
Peonies, early seventeenth century, by Kano Sanraku. Fusama (sliding doors), Shinden Building, Daikaku-ji Temple, Kyoto.
Kano Sanraku was the adopted son of the great sixteenth-century painter, Kano Eitoku. By adopting his talented pupil Eitoku helped to ensure the continuance of the family workshop. The Kano school would go on to dominate Japanese painting for generations.
Nowhere were artists as eclectic, ecumenical, and forward-looking as in the royal Mughal workshops. The Mughal emperor Akbar had been keenly interested in art since childhood, and he had assembled a workshop of elite artists at his court. His son Jahangir became a connoisseur of painting. He selectively promoted or dismissed artists from the atelier until its ranks rivaled any group of artists in the world. Jahangir took a keen interest in their activities, and he reported that he was able to identify the painter of a work merely on the basis of its style:
My liking for painting and my practice in judging it have arrived at such a point that when any work is brought before me, either of deceased artists or those of the present day, without the name being told me, I say on the spur of the moment that it is the work of such and such a man. And if there be a picture containing many portraits, and each face be the work of a different master, I can discover which face is the work of each of them. If any other person has put in the eye and eyebrow of a face, I can perceive whose work the original face is, and who has painted the eye and eyebrows.
Squirrels in a Plane Tree, 1605-1606, by Abul Hasan. Opaque watercolor on paper, 22 × 36 cm. British Library, Johnson Collection, Album 1.30.
Saint John, after Albrecht Durer, 1600-1601, by Abul Hasan. Opaque watercolor on paper, 5 × 10 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
These early works by Mughal painter Abul Hasan reflect the influences of Persian and Western artistic traditions.
Jahangir did not restrict his workshop to Muslims. More than half of his artists were Hindus. He was tolerant of different religious traditions and took an active interest in them — for example, he asked his nobles to acquire copies of the Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, in order to expose them to traditional Indian culture (p. 6). His artists illustrated classical Indian works and Hindu epics, and they assimilated influences from other cultures: first from Persia and later from Europe and East Asia.
Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to Jahangir’s court, often brought him Western paintings. On one occasion, he obtained a painting that he “esteemed very much, and was for curiositye rare,” which he decided would make a good gift for the emperor. Jahangir, Roe says,
tooke extreme content, showing it to everie man neare him; at last he sent for his cheefe paynter, demanding his opinion. The foole answered he could makes as good, wherat the King turned to me, saying my man sayth he can do the like and as well as this: what say yow? I replyed: I knew the contrarie … for I know non in Europe but the same master can performe it.
The exchange resulted in a wager between the emperor and the ambassador, and the painter went off to copy the painting. He completed several versions the same day. Jahangir summoned Roe:
At night he sent for mee, being hastie to triumph in his workman, and shewed me six pictures, five made by his man, all pasted on one table, so like that I was by candle light troubled to discerne which was which….
Jahangir and Jesus, 1615–1620, by Hashim (Jahangir) and Abul Hasan (Jesus).
Jahangir Preferring a Shaykh to Kings, 1615–1618, by Bichitr. Opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper, 18 × 25 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Purchase, F1942.15a.
In these images the head of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, whose many titles included The Light of Religion, is surrounded by a halo.
Who was the “cheefe paynter” who directed the production of several copies of Roe’s painting? He may have been the atelier manager, and the five copies might have been made by different artists despite Roe’s impression that they were all produced “by his man.” If they were indeed the work of a single painter, the likeliest candidate is an artist named Abul Hasan. Not only was he well versed in Western painting techniques, he was also highest in the esteem of Jahangir. The emperor had conferred on the painter the title of Nadir-uz Zaman, “Wonder of the Age.”
In contrast to much traditional Indian practice, painters in the royal Mughal workshop were recognized as individual artists, who often signed and inscribed their works. As a result we have an artistic record of the production of several prominent painters, although in most cases we have meager biographical detail about their lives. One of the main sources of information is Jahangir’s reign diary, the Jahangirnama, but he is mai
nly concerned with commissions and rewards rather than details of the painters’ personal lives.
In 1616 Hasan was only seventeen years old but he had already risen to a high rank among the painters of the royal Mughal workshop. His father was a painter named Aqa Riza, who had moved to India from Persia during the reign of Akbar to serve under Jahangir when he was still merely Prince Salim. Jahangir considered Abul Hasan to be a much greater painter than his father, who worked in the stylized Safavid style, with calligraphic lines and flat expanses of color and pattern. There was “no comparison between his work and that of his father,” he wrote. “One cannot put them in the same category.”
As a boy Hasan mastered his father’s Persian style of painting, but he was also exposed to the work of Western artists. At the age of twelve he made a drawing of Saint John copied from an engraving by Albrecht Durer. This early work shows a mastery of shading and volume, combined with a sensitive treatment of face and expression. It would be a remarkable achievement for a twelve-year-old in any context.
In one of the artist’s first mature works, Squirrels in a Plane Tree, made when he was about seventeen, he reveals the influence of his father’s Persian style. The flat gold sky and decorative pattern of gold and green leaves are similar to Safavid painting. The craggy rocks may reflect a Chinese influence passing through Persia. But the trunk of the tree is shaped and rounded, and the man posed to climb it is three-dimensional and naturalistic. The posture and movement of the dozen squirrels in the tree are realistic and must have derived from observation of squirrels in Jahangir’s zoo, since European squirrels are not native to India.
Jahangir used his atelier to document the events and personages of his reign, as well as the curious objects and creatures that made their way to his court. At some point he also began documenting his dreams and desires. Abul Hasan was the artist in whom he most confided on such matters. A prime example is his painting of Jahangir shooting an arrow through the decapitated head of Malik Ambar (cover and p. 21), which he painted in 1616. The same year he painted The Presentation of a Book by Sadi, in which a thirteenth-century mystical dervish returns to give a gift to Jahangir, while the Ottoman Sultan and Persian Shah are relegated to inferior positions.
Dipper and Other Birds, ca. 1620, by Mansur. Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund and the Kevorkian Foundation Gift, 1955, 55.121.10.16.
A couple of years later he did another painting in which the symbolism is even more obvious. Known as Jahangir’s Dream of the Visit of Shah Abbas (p. 304), it expressed Jahangir’s anxiety over developments on the Persian border. Shah Abbas had seized the fortress of Kandahar, which had been in Mughal possession for the better part of a century. Ostensibly the painting shows the embracing monarchs expressing deep amity. But Jahangir towers over Abbas. A golden halo seems to emanate from his head. His face is molded and well defined, while Abbas’s is flat and a bit vague. (Hasan had never seen Abbas and probably relied on Persian representations of him.) He stands on a lion, while the diminutive Abbas stands on a lamb. The lion and lamb lying together are a symbol of peace, but should hostilities erupt it is clear which would be more powerful. The animals lie on a globe that recalls Jahangir’s moniker Conqueror of the World, the lion stretching from India to Persia, and the lamb nestled in West Asia. According to an inscription, the painting represents a dream in which Jahangir saw Shah Abbas appear before him in a well of light. It is a masterpiece of political propaganda.
Part of the reason Jahangir was anxious about Abbas was that he was dealing with a rebellion by his son Khurram, the future Shah Jahan. Upon the death of Jahangir in 1627, Abul Hasan made a couple of paintings of the new emperor’s enthronement, and then is not heard from again. Perhaps after his years of intimate collaboration with Jahangir he could not adapt to serving his once rebellious son.
North American Turkey, ca. 1612, by Mansur. Victoria and Albert Museum, IM 135-1921.
It has sometimes been claimed that Squirrels in a Plane Tree was a collaboration between Abul Hasan and another painter of the Mughal atelier, named Ustad Mansur (“Ustad” is an honorific meaning “Master”), mainly on the basis of a notation added to the painting in the eighteenth century. Although this is probably untrue, it is understandable. Mansur was the greatest Mughal painter of natural history subjects.
It was an area in which Jahangir was deeply interested. A world in motion brought to his court many strange and curious creatures — including the European squirrels — which he invariably directed his painters to document. In 1612, when a large number of birds and animals were brought to his court from Goa, he wrote, “As these animals appeared to me to be very strange, I … ordered that painters should draw them in the Jahangirnama, so that the amazement that arose from hearing of them might be increased.”
Among the birds brought from Goa was an American turkey, which was painted by Mansur. Like Abul Hasan, Mansur ranked high in Jahangir’s esteem, and the ruler gave him the title of Nadir-ul-asr, “Unique of the Age.” “In the art of drawing,” he said, Mansur “is unique in his generation.” He ranked him together with Abul Hasan, saying, “In the time of my father’s reign and my own, these two had no third.”
Jahangir was proud of such creatures in his menagerie as flying mice, tailless monkeys, zebras, yaks, cheetahs, West Asian goats, Himalayan pheasants, dodos, ducks, and partridges. He had many of the foreign animals bred in captivity. When he received a strange animal he typically would record a verbal description of it before having its likeness painted. In 1616 he was presented with an Abyssinian elephant, noting that “Its ears are larger than the elephants of this place, and its trunk and tail are longer.” His concern for accuracy and completeness of documentation led to a naturalistic approach to paintings of natural history, of which Mansur was the foremost proponent.
Of the turkeycock he wrote that its body was “larger than a peahen and smaller than a peacock”:
When it is in heat and displays itself, it spreads out its feathers like the peacock and dances about. Its beak and legs are like those of a cock. Its head and neck and the part under the throat are every minute of a different color. When it is in heat it is quite red — one might say it had adorned itself with red coral — and after a while it becomes white in the same places, and it looks like cotton. It sometimes looks of a turquoise color. Like a chameleon it constantly changes color. Two pieces of flesh it has on its head look like the comb of a cock. A strange thing is this, that when it is in heat the aforesaid piece of flesh hangs down to the length of a span from the top of its head like an elephant’s trunk, and again when he raises it up it appears on its head like the horn of a rhinoceros, to the extent of two finger-breadths.
The new globalism was presenting people around the world with a look at aspects of foreign worlds that could seem exceptionally strange — no wonder that it was sometimes difficult to tell truth from fantasy.
Dodo and Other Birds, ca. 1625, probably by Mansur. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Surrounding the dodo are, clockwise from upper left: Blue-Crowned Hanging Parrot (Loriculus galgulus), native to Southeast Asia; Western Tragopan (Tragopan melanocephalus), native to the Himalayas; Painted Sandgrouse (Pterocles indicus), native to South Asia; and Bar-Headed Goose (Anser indicus), native to Central Asia.
Nothing is known of Mansur’s life. His depiction of the turkeycock is signed “work of the slave of the court Mansur Nadir-ul-asr”: such expressions of deference were common among the court painters. The painting effectively complements Jahangir’s description. Mansur scrupulously details the bird’s color and markings at the same time that he captures something of its rather comical swagger. Just as Jahangir confided intimately with Abul Hasan in his dream pictures, so he worked closely with Mansur to document the natural world: he could be regarded not just as a patron but as an active collaborator on much of the artistic production of his workshop.
Mansur places his turkey against a minim
alist background. In general his work features strong, lively lines with light fills of color, set against plain backgrounds, sometimes embelished with a few grasses or shrubs to suggest a context. An exception is his painting of a dipper (p. 170), which appears with other birds in a mountain landscape. In this case Jahangir probably wanted to document the setting as well as the bird itself.
Camel Fight, 1610–1620, School of Jahangir. Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay.
He observed it while visiting the Kashmir valley. He was impressed by the abundance of wildflowers there, which he had Mansur document. “The flowers that are seen in the department of Kashmir are beyond all calculation,” he enthused. “Those that Nadir-ul-asr has painted number more than a hundred.” It was here that he encountered the dipper:
The waterfall is in the middle of a valley. It descends from a lofty height. There was still ice around it…. In the stream I saw a bird like a saj. A saj is black in color with white spots, but this bird was the color of a bulbul with white spots. It dives and remains underwater for a long time, and then it comes back up in a different place. I ordered two or three of these birds to be caught, so that I could see whether they were waterfowl and were web-footed, or if they had open feet like land birds. Two were caught and brought back. One died immediately, and the other lived for a day. Its feet were not webbed. I ordered Nadir-ul-asr Ustad Mansur to draw its likeness.
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