From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
It is the tree that draws our eyes first: its leaves gleaming against the burnished gold of the background. Persian poets compared the five-lobed leaves of the čenār, the ‘Oriental plane tree’, to human hands. Here, the artist has caught them in autumnal glow. Clusters of leaves throng the page, shimmering in shades of gold and amber against greens that range from grape-skin to dark jade. The tree’s pale trunk rises up the page, spreading its branches to occupy the space almost entirely. Yet it also cuts a hospitable curve, making room at its base for some wild goats in a little green valley. Both valley and tree are watered by the narrow stream that meanders up from the lower right corner like a calligraphic flourish. The stream leads our eyes to its source – a tiny waterfall emerging from the hazy purple of the rocky outcrop in the middle distance – and from there we are back in the world of the leaves again.
It is no wonder that the squirrels play hide-and-seek with us at first: foregrounded, larger than life, yet difficult to spot in that extravagant canopy. There is a whole family of them, golden-brown, with white bellies gleaming softly as they run up and down the branches. One is busy grooming its bushy tail, perched on a branch on the left. Two inquisitive little heads twitch out of a nest in the tree trunk, their watchful parent poised on the branch to the right. There are birds too. Some solitary, some in pairs, some nestled among the leaves, others half-lost in the vegetation below.
None of them seem to have noticed the figure whom we, too, may be forgiven for ignoring at first: the man who stands at the foot of the tree, fingers firmly planted in a gnarl on its trunk, ready to hoist himself up. A strap running diagonally across his back may hide a weapon, or a satchel. He has the end of his tunic tucked practically into his belt. His intentions are unclear. He is a hunter, perhaps, or even an artist in search of squirrel hair for his brushes, given the lack of any visible weapons. Either way, the gap between him and the lowest squirrel is at once both tantalisingly short and frustratingly unsurmountable. His eyes travel up the tree trunk to the life overhead, the first branch just out of his reach. Gravity pins him to his place – he is stretching and reaching, but not quite there.
Squirrels in a plane tree (c. 1605–10), Abu’l Hasan and Mansur, from the Johnson Album, British Library, London. Photo: © The British Library Collection
Squirrels in a plane tree was painted in the early 17th century in India, at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569–1627). Its original inscription has long since been obliterated, but a later, 18th-century manuscript attribution on the reverse identifies it as ‘amal-i Nadir al-‘Asr Nadir al-Zaman’ (the work of one who is Unparalleled in this Age, Wonder of these Times). The double title could indicate one exceptional artist, or two working together. Mansur, the leading naturalist painter of the Mughal court, was often referred to as ‘Nadir al-‘Asr’, as were a number of other artists. Only one, however – Abu’lHasan– had been awarded the title of ‘Nadir al-Zaman’.
The emperor Jahangir’s memoir recorded in the summer of 1618 how ‘on this date Abu’l-Hasan the artist, who had been awarded the title Nadiruzzaman’ had offered him a painting. ‘Without exaggeration, his work is perfect, and his depiction is a masterpiece of the age,’ the emperor wrote. Abu’l-Hasan was in his twenties at that point, a former child prodigy whose precocious talent had developed into a mastery evident in numerous collections of Mughal art.
The work of Abu’l-Hasan and his contemporaries form the subject of an upcoming exhibition, ‘The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence’, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (9 November–5 May 2025), where they will feature alongside a range of objects, from precious stones to rarely displayed carpets, fabric and tiles. Within that selection, two paintings that were once part of the same Mughal muraqqa’ (collector’s album) provide a quick introduction to their world for the uninitiated. The imaginary family reunions that these paintings offer us are useful, neat encapsulations of dynastic inheritance, starting with Babur (1483–1530) – the Turco-Mongol founder of the Mughal empire who invaded the subcontinent in 1526, and claimed descent from not just one but two great Central Asian conquerors: Timur the Great and Genghis Khan. In the first painting, Timur passes the imperial crown to his descendant Babur, while Babur’s son Humayun (1508–56) watches on. In the second, Humayun’s son Akbar (1542–1605) hands his imperial crown to Shah Jahan (1592–1658), the son of Jahangir.
In reality succession was rarely, if ever, so amicably achieved, but the paintings have the first five Mughal emperors and their legendary ancestor sitting peacefully together, enthroned under scarlet imperial canopies, with their respective ministers in attendance in front of them. Within their ornamental frames, art allows for an imperial mythography supremely confident in the endurance of its own power, and immune to the prosaic limitations of time and place. Yet at the same time, these two paintings by the two Hindu artists – Bichitr and Govardhan – in the multicultural, multilingual environment of the imperial studios established by Akbar, incorporate both Persian and local influences; they are examples of the uniquely fruitful syncretism that characterised Mughal painting in the early 17th century.
Timur handing the crown to Babur in the presence of Humayun (c. 1630–40), attrib. to Govardhan. From the Minto Album, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
These are the images that come to mind when we think of Mughal art. Stylised and idealised portraits, the figures they depict are both human beings and symbols. ‘A good likeness of me in my fortieth year,’ Shah Jahan noted in his own hand on an exquisite portrait painted by Bichitr c. 1630, but even that appearance against a verdant background, flanked by flowering plants on either side, seems curiously unmoored. In another roughly contemporaneous portrait, he stands on a globe, with winged European angels emerging from the clouds above, holding imperial insignia over him. Viewers familiar with such iconography from European paintings may be reminded of the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I, but while the Virgin Queen of England is shown standing on a map of the country under her rule, the globe under Shah Jahan’s feet is devoid of any temporal or geographical markers. A lion and a lamb occupy that space instead, symbols of the universal ruler’s control over laws of nature that would otherwise separate the hunter from the hunted, the oppressor and the oppressed.
Paintings such as these were rarely displayed individually. The leaves of a muraqqa’ served as portable picture galleries. On each of them, thin sheets of ornamentation were built up in layers as the setting for the displayed item. The paintings themselves vary in size from a few square inches in area to the best part of a folio sheet. Some are free-standing works of art. Others offer a visual commentary on the calligraphy that took centrestage. Many were created to illustrate the outputs of the imperial kitabkhana (scriptorium), where scholars and artists of different nationalities, languages, and faiths – Persian, Indian, Armenian and European; Hindu, Muslim and Christian – produced exquisite copies of epics such as the Persian Hamzanama and the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata, as well as the memoirs and biographies of the emperors themselves: the Baburnama for Akbar, the Jahangirnama of his son, Jahangir, the Padshahnama of his grandson, Shah Jahan.
Shah Jahan as the King of the World (c. 1628–30), Bichitr. From the Minto Album, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin
Vegetation is a recurrent element both within these paintings and across them. Flowers and plants bloom in the extravagantly illuminated borders. Their presence constitutes a vegetal network that ties together what the word muraqqa’ would otherwise identify as a ‘patchwork’. There is, perhaps, an inherent irony in this. Babur did not think much at first of the native flora of the country he had conquered. Like the Portuguese and English adventurers and colonisers who came centuries after him, he was attracted to India because it was a country with ‘lots of gold and money’. But for this exiled, nomadic warrior, the land itself had seemed unreconcilably alien.
‘Its mountains, rivers, forests, and wildernesses, its villages and provinces, animals and plants, peoples and languages, even its rain and winds are altogether different,’ he wrote in his memoirs. He praised its hibiscus, but complained that it faded too quickly; the oleander’s perfume was too faint, and the white jasmine too strong. Mangoes were paltry recompense for the musk-melons of his Uzbek childhood. He rejoiced when he could record the planting of his first garden, ‘marvellously regular and geometric’, in the middle of India’s chaotic, confusing plenty. Yet just three generations later, the memoirs of his great-grandson Jahangir – son of a Turco-Mongol father and Hindu Rajput mother – would proclaim that ‘[f]rom the point of view of herbs and fragrant flowers, India is preferable to anywhere else in the inhabited part of the world’.
Deeply curious and interested in the natural world, Jahangir wrote of the love that he shared with his father Akbar for particular varieties of mangoes, and how quickly imported plants and fruits – like ‘the one called ananas [pineapple]’ introduced by the Portuguese – flourished on Indian soil. His description of the Indian lotus and water lily is a mingling of naturalism and literary sensibility on the one hand, and the worlds of Persian and Hindi lyricism on the other. ‘Because the black bee is a constant visitor to these flowers, the Hindi poets consider it to be like the nightingale in love with the rose, and they produce marvellous poetic conceits based on it,’ he observed. By the time Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan was on the throne, the court poet Amir Khusrau could write about India as a paradise on earth, and the emperor would have his couplet inscribed on the walls on his new palace, where a fittingly paradisiacal charbagh (four quadrant garden) took pride of place.
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that among the items brought together for the exhibition at the V&A, flowers and plants are noticeable not just on the pages of the muraqqa’ of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, twisting in both naturalistic and stylised profusion around the elegant curls of displayed calligraphy, or the artful arrangement of human figures. On the transparent, glass-like surface of a rock-crystal bowl, engraved fronds and blossoms catch the light, as they do on etched emerald beads and enamelled rings and amulets. Trailing vines appear woven and embroidered on carpets and hunting jackets. Pietra dura sprays and clusters in bulbous vases are carved into the white marble facade of the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum that grief-stricken Shah Jahan commissioned for his wife Mumtaz.
Porcelain dish with lotus flowers (c. 1400–25), from Jingdezhen, China. Wallington, National Trust. Photo: Robert Morris; © National Trust Images
Like the plants collected and grafted by the emperors in their gardens, Mughal art flourished and blossomed on fertile ground in 17th-century India. Many of those blooms had been transplanted too. The lotus flowers on an early 15th-century porcelain dish engraved with Shah Jahan’s name are of Chinese rather than Indian origin: evidence of the long-standing trade connections between China and the Islamicate empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. It is a connection that had fuelled the export of porcelain industry based in the Chinese provinces of Jingdezhen, Longquan and Fujian since the 13th century. Precious porcelain bowls and cups from those far-off kilns fill the display alcoves of the chini-khana (porcelain house) in the background of the painting of ‘Jahangir weighing his son Prince Khurram’ (c. 1614). The painting depicts an ancient Indian custom that the Mughals had borrowed from their Hindu counterparts, in which a king distributed his own body weight in gold, silver, and other commodities and foodstuffs among his subjects in need.
Jahangir weighing prince Khurram against gold and silver (c. 1615) from a dispersed Jahangirnama, Mughal dynasty, India. British Museum, London. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum
Some flora and fauna come from entirely the other side of the known world. Art historians have long pointed out how Akbar’s curiosity about other religions and cultures set the tone for his successors and opened up a whole new visual rhetoric for Mughal artists. Biblical and classical figures, winged cherubs, hourglasses and globes find their way into Mughal paintings and their margins throughout this period, introduced through European curiosities, prints and books brought to the Mughal court by visiting Jesuit priests such as Rodolfo Acquaviva and Antoni de Montserrat, and early English merchants and travellers such as the first English ambassador to India, Sir Thomas Roe. Among the paintings by Mansur are his exquisite depictions of the North American turkey cock that was brought to Jahangir from the Portuguese in Goa in c. 1612, and of the zebra gifted to the emperor in 1621, its stripes accurate enough to enable its identification as an African Burchell’s zebra.
Yet not all such paintings of the natural world were life studies. When it came to plants and flowers, in particular, books and prints, rather than the living things themselves, helped to convey ideas across the seas. Some of Mansur’s floral paintings in Jahangir’s great Gulshan album, now in Tehran, are gloriously coloured versions of plates copied directly from the Florilegium of Adriaen Collaert (Antwerp, 1587; 1590). Even more strikingly syncretic is a later painting produced for Shah Jahan’s eldest son, Dara Shikoh, in which a prince in Persian costume pours wine from a bejewelled flask. In front of him are flowering plants inspired by European florilegia, but they are arranged in a row along the bottom of the painting in a style associated mostly with the artistic traditions of the Deccan plateau. Next to him is a Collaert-inspired flower arrangement, but it is displayed in a vase that conflates the distinctive blue and white of Chinese porcelain with a classical European shape.
Squirrels in a plane tree is a product of that same syncretism. The tree at the centre of the scene gestures to the visual vocabulary of an older generation of artists trained in the Islamic Safavid Persian tradition, within which the čenār had always occupied a special place. The plane tree with its solitary striped Indian squirrel in Abd al-Samad’s tonal drawing of ‘Akbar and a Dervish’ (c. 1586–87), or providing the backdrop to the human drama of death and loss in Aqa Riza of Herat’s Youth fallen from a tree (c. 1610), would have been deeply familiar to an artist such as Aqa Riza’s son, Abu’l-Hasan. But along with his study of their elegant, stylised flatness and linear clarity, Abu’l-Hasan – like many of his contemporaries – also absorbed the skilled, loose brushwork and iconography of Hindu artists such as Govardhan and Manohar, and the imported figural mastery of European artists such as Dürer.
Akbar and a Dervish (c. 1586–87), Abd al-Samad. Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. Photo: © The Aga Khan Museum
In his earliest surviving work, made when he was just 13 years old, Abu’l-Hasan copied Dürer’s anguished Saint John the Evangelist from a depiction of the crucifixion, grappling with the weight and heft of textures and emotions – the folds of the saint’s robe, the tension in the fingers of his clasped hands. That same consciousness shapes the gently peeling, rounded trunk of the majestic plane tree that stands out from the flattened perspective of the backdrop. The squirrels are an even clearer borrowing: common red squirrels, found only in Europe and north Asia, rather than Indian ones drawn by Abd al-Samad, which have led scholars to suggest that along with the pale-skinned, sharp-featured tree-climber, they are likely to be copies from European images.
In recent years, art historians have debated the extent to which our understanding of Mughal art has been constrained by European aesthetics. The assimilation of European styles and influences within Indo-Persian art in paintings has often been read historically as a teleological narrative of ‘development’, moving from archaic abstraction towards ‘modern’ psychological realism. Yet the plane tree sustaining both its playful wild inhabitants and the ambiguous human intruder is a striking reminder of the complexity of transcultural negotiations, where intrusion becomes coexistence, and conflation often turns into an elusive ‘third thing’ that resists easy categorisation. That it is the oriental plane tree which offers us a vantage point to see the unfolding complexity of that process is particularly fitting. In both European and Persian traditions, the čenār was known for its travels and its ability to set down roots far from its original home.
‘But who is there that will not, with good reason, be surprised to learn that a tree has been introduced among us from a foreign clime for nothing but its shade’, the Roman naturalist and geographer Pliny the Elder asked in his Natural History. He reminded his readers how the plane had been brought across the Ionian Sea, ‘and was afterwards imported thence into Sicily, being one of the very first exotic trees that were introduced into Italy’.
It was a blessed tree, the 13th-century Persian statesman and historian Rashīd-al-Din noted: it flourished wherever it was planted, and offered a willing graft for other fruited trees and vine. In London in the mid 17th century, an oriental plane in the garden of the royal gardener and collector, John Tradescant the Younger, would cross-pollinate with another transplanted visitor, the American sycamore, to produce what is now the most common tree in the city, the London plane. In Mughal art and on London streets, the presence of the plane is a reminder of the profound interconnectedness of both human and non-human histories.
A Prince in a Persian costume pouring wine (c. 1633–34), Muhammad Khan. From the Dara Shikoh Album, British Library, London. Photo: © The British Library Collection
‘The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence’ is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 9 November–5 May 2025.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.