The story
Around 1562 the young Mughal emperor Akbar set up a royal painting workshop and ordered its first great project, the Hamzanama, an illustrated telling of the adventures of Amir Hamza, a legendary hero loosely based on an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. It was planned as about 1,400 paintings, each roughly 67 by 51 centimeters on cloth, far larger than a normal manuscript page, and took some fifteen years to complete. Fewer than 200 pages survive, scattered among museums in Vienna, London and elsewhere.
The workshop brought two traditions together. Akbar's father Humayun returned to India in 1555 with two Persian masters, Mir Sayyid Ali and Khwaja Abd al-Samad, from a line of painting that went back to the Timurid court of Herat. Akbar then hired dozens of Indian painters, many of them Hindu artists, who brought bold color, lively movement and a feeling for animals and landscape. The blend was new, and it grew more naturalistic: European prints brought by Jesuits from 1580 added shading and depth, and under Akbar's son Jahangir, painters such as Mansur made precise studies of birds, animals and flowers. The style spread to the Deccan and the Rajput courts.
Why it mattered
- Mughal painting set a long-lasting standard for Indian court art, inspiring the Rajput and Pahari schools of the 1600s and 1700s.
- It combined Persian, Indian and, later, European elements, showing how the Mughal court worked as a meeting point of cultures.
- Its detailed natural history studies and portraits provide lasting records of the people, animals and plants of the period.
- Collections of Mughal paintings built in Europe and the United States later shaped how the world views Indian art.
Sources
- The arts of the Mughal Empire Victoria and Albert Museum
- Mughal painting Britannica
- Mir Sayyid Ali Britannica
- 'Abd al-Samad The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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