Add Or 5642

Drawing with colour on paper, 400 by 620 mm.

Provenance:

Swiss private collection, acquired 1960s

Inscriptions:

Inscribed above the principal figure ‘Ahmad Shah Bahad[ur] Ba[d]shah ibn Muhammad Shah Badshah’ (‘The Emperor Ahmad Shah son of the Emperor Muhammad Shah’)

The young emperor crouches before his tent aiming his musket at a group of blackbuck, one of which falls while the others flee in terror. The emperor is accompanied by some women from his harem who have their own muskets. A hill rises behind the principal figures and beyond we see the procession formed by the army with great elephants, horses and banners. Nearer at hand attendants carry two palanquins for when the hunters tire. The drawing is tinted in shades of yellow and green with some red highlights including the tent and the imperial banners.

Portraits of Ahmad Shah (Mughal Emperor from 1748 to 1754) are very rare. He was born in 1725, the son of the Emperor Muhammad Shah (1719-48) by his favourite dancing girl Udham Bhai the Qudsia Begum. He came to the throne at the age of 23, proved incapable of governing (during his reign north India was terrorised by the Rohillas, the Marathas and the Afghans) and was deposed by his chief minister Ghazi al-din Khan in favour of another branch of the family. Ahmad Shah was blinded and imprisoned with his mother until he died in 1774. Any portrait of him therefore which treats him as the emperor must be dated in the brief years of his reign and show him as a young man in his 20s. The most reliable inscribed portrait of him is in Polier Album I5063 in Berlin (Weber, fig. 87) showing him as a young man with a small moustache and short sideburns. His appearance is replicated in another inscribed Polier album page showing all the Mughal emperors up to Shah ‘Alam (Weber, fig, 92, no. 16). Our drawing indeed shows the emperor as a young athletic man with the same moustache and sideburns as in the Berlin portraits.

Ahmad Shah is in fact very different in appearance to his father Muhammad Shah although the two have often been confused. Welch (no. 68) and Gahlin (no. 40) both treat portraits of a Mughal emperor on a horse or elephant respectively as portraits of Ahmad Shah, but as McInerney points out (figs. 15-16, note 28), those portraits are of his father Muhammad Shah, instantly recognisable through his portly figure, large nose, long curling sideburns and double chin. Binney (no. 81) identifies a young emperor on horseback as Ahmad Shah, but again as Weber (p. 436) and McInerney point out (fig. 1, note 5) this is a portrait of the young Muhammad Shah. Falk and Archer (no. 192) identify a standing portrait inscribed as Muhammad Shah as a portrait of Ahmad Shah, but without any supporting evidence. That portrait does not resemble this figure at all.

Whereas imperial portraiture for most of Muhammad Shah’s reign shows the emperor in enclosed situations (even his famous peregrination through his garden in the Boston MFA is still enclosed), towards the end of his reign there was initiated a fashion for opening out the space into extensive landscapes that serve as backdrops. The painting published by Welch shows the emperor in the open on a hunting expedition with a landscape filled by thousands of small figures in the accompanying army, a brilliantly streaked sky and thunderous clouds. Our drawing closely resembles it in composition and treatment of the landscape and is very possibly by the same artist, whom McInerney somewhat implausibly identifies as Puran Nath known as Hunhar II, who is known mostly for his standing portraits.

Literature:

Binney, E., 3rd, Indian Miniature Painting from the Collection of Edwin Binney, 3rd : the Mughal and Deccani Schools, Portland, 1973

Welch, S.C., A Flower from Every Meadow, The Asia Society, New York, 1973

Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981

Weber, R., Porträts und historische Darstellungen in der Miniaturensammlung des Museums für Indische Kunst, Berlin, Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin, 1982

Gahlin, S., The Courts of India: Indian Miniatures from the Collection of the Fondation Custodia, Paris, Fondation Custodia/Waanders Publishers, Paris and Zwolle, 1991

McInerney, T., ‘Mughal Painting during the Reign of Muhammad Shah’ in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. B. Schmitz, Bombay, 2002, pp. 12-33