Jahangir had brought Mansur with him on his trip, which enabled the artist to see the live bird in action in its natural habitat. No doubt this helped him to capture its lively spirit. The bird perches beside a flowing stream in a rocky landscape, corresponding to Jahangir’s written description.
To depict a Mauritius dodo that a merchant had presented to the emperor, Mansur had to study the bird in Jahangir’s menagerie. It remains one of the most accurate surviving representations of the live bird, which went extinct later the same century.
Mansur was not a portrait painter — only a small number of surviving portraits are attributable to him. For portraits Jahangir often relied on a painter named Bishandas. It was Bishandas whom Jahangir sent with his embassy to Persia to bring back a true likeness of Shah Abbas so that Jahangir could better understand his counterpart and sometime adversary (p. 292). On his return from Persia Bishandas was rewarded by the emperor with an elephant, a lavish gift for a painter.
An elephant as a symbol of the emperor’s magnaminity appears in a painting held within a painting by Bichitr, an artist who combined skills at portraiture and allegory. The painting is held by Bichitr himself in a self-portrait in the painting Jahangir Preferrring a Shaykh to Kings (p. 169). Bichitr appears in the lowest position among the figures, wearing a red turban. He looks to be around thirty, which would make him about the same age or a little older than Abul Hasan, but he does not seem to have been a prodigy, since his first paintings only appear around 1615.
Above Bichitr, in the next lowest position, is James I of England, copied from a painting by John de Critz given to Jahangir by Thomas Roe, the English ambassador. Next appears an Ottoman sultan who, unlike James, gazes at Jahangir, who is surrounded by a halo of light. An inscription identifies him as “Light of the Faith.” He sits on an hourglass throne, on which Western-style angels are recording a wish for his long life. Jahangir does not return the Turk’s look but instead faces a Sufi shaykh. The message is clear that Jahangir values eternal spiritual matters above those of the transitory world. Though charming and effective, the painting is a little more dogmatic and less mysterious and evocative than similar symbolic works by Abul Hasan.
Asaf Khan, ca. 1615, ascribed to Bichitr. Opaque watercolor on paper, 20 × 27 cm. Minto (A), VA, IM, 27–1925.
Bichitr’s 1615 portrait of Asaf Khan, the influential brother of Nur Jahan, who received one of the first copies of the Nahagirnama, exemplifies his skill at blending portraiture and allegory (I prefer it to his 1616 portrait of the same subject). Asaf Khan dwarfs the cityscape, warriors and prisoners, and an elephant bearing the Mughal flag behind him. The composition underscores the power of its subject, who holds his hands in a gesture of thanksgiving, as angels look down from the sky. Bichitr does not attempt to bring any of the figures other than Asaf Khan out from the background, but makes them recede by blending them with the surrounding colors. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the subject’s carefully worked face, which seems to convey an essential quality of his forceful character.
Inayat Khan, 1610, attributed to Daulat. Opaque watercolor on paper, 6 × 14 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund and the Kevorkian Foundation, 55.121.10.295.
Inayat Khan Dying, ca. 1618, by Balchand. Opaque watercolor on paper, 15 × 12 cm. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ouseley add. 171 b 4r.
Jahangir saw portraiture as another form of documentation of his world. In the Jahangirnama he tells the story of a military official named Inayat Khan, whom Jahangir characterizes as “one of my closest servants and subjects.” In a 1610 portrait attributed to Dawlat, Inayat Khan appeared as a robust, dashing figure. But eight years later he presented himself before Jahangir as a wasted man. “In addition to eating opium he also drank wine when he had the chance,” Jahangir remarks without irony: opium and wine were the emperor’s own vices.
Little by little he became obsessed with wine, and since he had a weak frame, he drank more than his body could tolerate and was afflicted with diarrhea. While so weakened he was overcome two or three times by something like epileptic fits. By my order Hakim Rukna treated him, but no matter what he did it was to no avail…. I ordered him brought to me to be given leave to depart. He was put in a palanquin and brought. He looked incredibly weak and thin — “skin and bones….” It was so strange that I ordered the artists to draw his likeness.
Jahangir had the dying man brought to the palace and propped up with pillows. His feet were wrapped in a shawl. The voluminous pillows and coverings contrast with the frailty of the dying man. The geometric planes of strong color, which give the painting a modern feel, again contrast with the man’s lack of vitality. He died two days later.
Besides Abul Hasan, Mansur, and Bichitr, Jahangir’s large workshop employed many more skilled painters, men with names like Balchand, Basawan, Daulat, Hashim, Manohar, Miskin, and Payag. The names of a few women also appear on the signatures of his workshop’s paintings: Nadira Banu, Ruqiya Banu, Sahifa Banu. Through their efforts and Jahangir’s own enthusiasm, discrimination, and active collaboration, the visual documentation of his world is one of the most ambitious and comprehensive ever undertaken by any monarch.
Barefoot Youth, ca. 1600, by Riza-yi Abbasi. Opaque watercolor on paper. 7 × 14 cm. Art and Hisory Trust, Houston.
This painting exemplifies the “unspoiled sweetness and charm,” the “irrestibile optimism, joy and youthful promise” that art historian Sheila Canby describes in Riza’s early work. Compare this to Riza’s later painting of a Page with Goblet (p. 301), where the youth’s expression holds the suggestion of a sly smirk.
Through his father, Aqa Riza, Abul Hasan was influenced by the stylized painting of Safavid Persia. By coincidence, the greatest Persian painter of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was also named Aqa Riza, though he is better known as Riza-yi Abbasi. To further confuse matters, a third artist, the shah’s favorite calligrapher, was named Ali Riza Abbasi.
“Abassi” was an honorary name given Riza by Shah Abbas to express his appreciation of the artist’s talent. But the two did not always have an easy relationship. Like Mansur and other artists of the Mughal workshop, Riza served the emperor and often traveled with him. Appointed director of the royal library in 1598, he led a workshop of painters, calligraphers, bookbinders, gilders, and others, and he executed royal commissions. But Riza had a strong independent streak, which led him to withdraw from court life entirely for several years.
The outlines of his life are told in two brief biographies of him, one published in 1616 and the other about a decade earlier. To these can be added the evidence of his prolific output of paintings, many of which are dated. His career can be broadly divided into three stages: his lively work during the last decades of the sixteenth century, his period of retreat from the court from about 1603 to 1610, and his more studied and complicated final period until his death in 1635.
The son of the painter Ali Asghar, Riza was probably born sometime in the 1560s, during the long reign (1524–1576) of Abbas’s grandfather, Shah Tahmasp. Tahmasp neutralized the long-standing conflict between Anatolian Turkmen and native Iranian Tajiks, partly by assimilating large numbers of Circassians and Georgians (initially introduced as prisoners of war) to act as a buffer and serve as a military unattached to either party.
Scribe, ca. 1600, by Riza-yi Abbasi. Drawing, 7 × 10 cm. British Museum, inv. no. 1920-9-17-0271 (1).
Wrestler, ca. 1607–1609, by Riza-yi Abbasi. Drawing on paper, 6 × 14 cm. L. A. Mayer Memorial Institute for Islamic Art, Jerusalem.
Tahmasp had studied painting, and he became a great patron of painters, commissioning important manuscripts illustrated by the leading artists of the time. By mid-century, however, he had got serious about religion. In 1555 he issued an Edict of Sincere Repentance, and he renounced sensual pleasures. He prohibited, among other things, gambling, prostitution, and alcohol use. He effectively dissolved his painting workshop. Many of his court artists sought employment in the Mughal c
ourt. Others resorted to peddling paintings in bazaars and markets or found nonroyal patrons. The result was a greater emphasis on one-off paintings as opposed to large projects of illustrated manuscripts employing many artists. Much of Riza’s work would be in the nature of single paintings.
The ascension of the sixteen-year-old Abbas in 1587 would lead to a great flourishing of the arts. In 1598, having improved the country’s political stability, Abbas moved his capital from Qasvin near the Caspian Sea (which was more vulnerable to attack from the Ottomans; the previous capital, Tabriz, had already been lost to them) south to Isfahan, which was essentially a planned city rather than one that had grown organically. Under Abbas’s direction the city became internationally recognized as a marvel of bold, ambitious architecture.
Abbas reassembled the royal painting workshop and hired Ali Asghar and his son to participate in it. Riza’s earliest dated works are from the early 1590s; they were followed by a great outpouring of paintings throughout the decade, most in the form of single pages (the single-page paintings were often gathered in albums called muraqqa’).
Riza specialized in two types of subjects: fashionable young men and women of the court, and older workmen and religious figures. Riza’s youthful subjects during his early period come across as dandies, but they retain an air of innocence. Even as late as 1600, his Barefoot Youth (p. 177), who is depicted with an unusual, bright color palette, has a fresh and cheerful air. Riza’s young men, in contrast to earlier Safavid painting, are fuller, rounder, and more sensuous. Despite his complicated pose the youth seems comfortable and relaxed, if a bit overindulged: he is surrounded by fruit on a golden dish, a golden ewer, and a golden cup full of wine. He rests on pillows brocaded with an ibex and other images.
Woman Seated in a Tree, 1616, by Riza-yi Abbasi. Opaque watercolors on paper, 10 × 20 cm. Philadelphia Free Library, Lewis Collection, inv. no. p120.
European Giving a Dog a Drink, 1634, by Riza-yi Abbasi. Opaque watercolor on paper, 14 × 19 cm. Detroit Institute of the Arts, inv. no. 58.334.
Although elements of Riza’s paintings are formulaic, he usually succeeds in conveying his subjects’ personalities. A portrait of a scribe painted aroud the same time as the barefoot youth captures the calligrapher’s intent, direct gaze, which contrasts with his haphazardly wrapped turban.
Around 1603, Abbasi (“of Abbas”) began to appear in Riza’s signature, signaling his favor with the shah. Yet, strangely, this is the very time that Riza chose to absent himself from the court. Was Abbas aware that Riza was thinking of retiring from official painting and seeking to retain him by bestowing the title upon him? Or, as Sheila Canby, who has written extensively about Riza and his context, speculates, was the burden of the honor too great for him? There is no way to know, but according to the biography of him written in 1616, Riza at this time descended into a life spent with “hapless people and libertines.”
He became “addicted to watching wrestling and to acquiring competence and instruction in the sport.” Wrestlers occupied a low rung of society, and Riza’s attraction to them suggests a spirit of rebellion. Wrestlers were often associated with Sufism, which was repressed within the circle of Abbas’s court. It is possible that Riza’s rebellious libertinage had a religious component. During this period he concentrated more on drawing than painting, and gave up the rich colors of his earlier work. An example is a drawing of a wrestler from 1607–1609. The bare-chested wrestler, depicted with short hair, strong arms, and the suggestion of a pot belly, smiles unaffectedly. His masculinity is strongly asserted.
When Riza returned to court painting in 1610 (perhaps simply because he needed the income) his work no longer retained the innocent spirit of his early period. His paintings were now more studied and calculated, and less spontaneous — “Never again can we become giddy with wonder at his every stroke,” says Sheila Canby. The Page with a Golden Goblet shown on p. 301 resembles the Barefoot Youth, but he now wears the hint of a jaded smirk.
The Buddhist deity Samantabhadra (Puxian) on a White Elephant, 1602, by Wu Bin. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper. H: 65 × 128 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing.
Wu Bin’s interest in Buddhism was expressed in paintings such as this, in which the celestial bodhisattva Samantabhadra receives a foreign monk while sitting on a white elephant.
The attendant figures include persons of several ethnicities. Wu Bin, himself a traveler, would have seen foreigners of many types during his childhood in the maritime trade province of Fujian. Buddhism itself was a religion of foreign origin, and the elephant seems to allude to this. The image of the deity surrounded by flowers is also unusual and suggests foreign influence.
Wu Bin modestly describes himself as a “lay Buddhist of Branch Hidden Temple” in his signature inscription.
Some of his later paintings could be seen as slyly ironic. In 1616 he painted Woman Seated in a Tree. She sits in a provocative pose, with her sash undone and her dress unbuttoned. But the pose emphasizes the mass of her thighs and belly, and it is possible that Riza intends an ironic effect by placing the large woman on a small tree. Nearby are fruits and wine bottles like those that appeared in his early Barefoot Youth, and the woman holds what looks like a pear in her hand. The symbolism of the hare depicted on a Chinese blue-and-white porcelain must intend some comment, but its meaning is no longer certain.
Riza’s last dated work shows a European reclining on decorated pillows and feeding wine to a small dog — Riza’s paintings of Europeans at the end of his life started a vogue for such subjects. The symbolic meaning of the bird, the man, and the heron on the pillows has been lost, and it is hard to be sure how to take the painting’s inscription, which reads “Bare from head to toe my passion pursues a foreigner in that nation of youths.” But the man on the pillow, who wears a pointed hat, seems to wear a foolish expression, and the overall effect is of a silly but handsome young dandy who might be at once an object of both attraction and amusement.
In contrast to the painters of the royal Mughal court, Riza-yi Abbasi struggled against the confines of court painting. In asserting his independence as an artist and retiring from the court scene for several years he signaled the beginning of the modern artist as an outsider and critic of society.
In China, European influence was strongest in the southern coastal regions where contact with foreigners had been ongoing since the early sixteenth century. An artist named Wu Bin was born there, and probably saw European engravings and paintings that influenced his use of light and dark to mold three-dimensional forms, as well as the incorporation of some aspects of Western perspective.
Wu was a professional painter who shared Dong Qichang’s fondness for fantastic forms. But the two artists were not much alike. Dong’s landscapes are spacially incoherent — often the components of the painting cannot be resolved one to another in any plausible way. Instead, the paintings are unifed by brushstrokes and other semi-abstract elements. Wu, on the other hand, uses the techniques of realism to create scenes that are spacially plausible, if preposterous.
In the last decade of the sixteenth century Wu moved to the old imperial capital of Nanjing, where he became influenced by Northern Song dynasty landscapes and worked as a painter for the imperial court. Northern Song landscapes often captured in a single view one central image, as opposed to many Chinese paintings that could be read as a sequence of multiple views, one after another.
After a few years Wu took a leave from his court duties to partake in the craze for travel, especially to mountainous regions, that took hold in the late Ming. The craze found its highest literary expression in the travel writings of Xu Xiake (p. 347). Wu journeyed to Sichuan, where he climbed many famous peaks. Afterward it was said that his paintings became “even more remarkable than before.”
A mountain scene that Wu painted probably around 1616 (opposite left) is monumental in scale — it is more than ten feet tall. The painting must have been made for one of the palatial buildings for which the southern Mi
ng capital was renowned. The contorted spires and twists of the painting strain skyward, reflecting the late Ming taste for the fantastic. The mountain’s verticality is emphasized by the painting’s narrow width, less than a third of its height. Yet halfway up a house perches implacably on a sheer cliff ledge, while below a boat sails blithely by. The matter-of-factness of the presentation adds to the painting’s disorienting quality. Similarly, in a 1617 painting (opposite right) that is more than seven feet tall, buildings perch precariously on a ledge while clouds wrap sinuously around spires and dangling, distorted crags, and a waterfall plunges from an astonishing height.
Pine Lodge amid Tall Mountains by Wu Bin (active ca. 1590–1625). China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Hanging scroll, ink on paper, 98 × 308 cm. Asian Art Museum, Gift of the Avery Brundage Collection Symposium Fund and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum Trust Fund, B69D17.
A Thousand Cliffs and Myriad Ravines, 1617, by Wu Bin. Hanging scroll, ink and color on satin, 47 × 200 cm. Indianapolis Museum of Art.
For the Chinese, mountains were spiritual places where the earthly world met the heavens. Wu’s contorted mountainscapes are like the spires of Western gothic cathedrals, stretching skyward out of spiritual yearning. Perhaps because of the sheer power of supernatural presence contained in them, the landscapes can appear dangerous or threatening. Yet boats sail serenely under the towering peaks, and mountain residents go about their business without apparent concern for their perilous situations.
Wu demonstrates in these paintings what the technical prowess of a professional painter could achieve. Dong Qichang took note, but did not alter his theoretical preference for amateur painting. Instead, he paid Wu what for him was a high compliment: he said that Wu wasn’t really a professional painter. He was a lay Buddhist who “painted in his leisure time.”
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