Exhibitions 1
Princes, Poets and Paladins (Room 90, British Museum, till 12 April)
Princely pleasures
Martin Gayford
We are well off for exhibitions in London this season. Bonnard, Bacon, Van Eyck and Cartier-Bresson are all essential viewing. But find time too, if you can, to visit the exhibition of Islamic and Indian paintings from the collection of the Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan which is hidden away in the recesses of the British Museum. It contains, among many fine things, perhaps the single finest sheet in the entire history of Persian painting. `The Court of Gayumars' by Sultan- Mohammad is a miniature that has been renowned since it was first executed in the early 16th century, a high point of Islamic art. It occurs in a manuscript of the Shah- Hama — The Book of Kings — produced for the Shah Tahmasp I, who reigned from 1524 to 1576. This ruler was himself an amateur painter of talent, and in his earlier years an enthusiastic patron of art. Artists vied for his favour, as did the masters at the courts of Renaissance Italy.
A particularly beautiful miniature might be rewarded, on the right day, with the gift Animals and ascetics in a Landscape, India, Deccan, Hyderabad c. 1690 of a village and its lands. On the other hand, Tahmasp's displeasure could be sharply felt. A painter who unwisely ran off with the Shah's favourite page-boy had his nose cut off personally by the royal hand (happily, in time he returned to court, for- given, and sporting a fine, hand-coloured nose of wood).
Of the Shah's artists, the finest, it was recognised at the time, was Nizamuddin Sultan-Muhammad, 'the rarity of the age', `who has developed depiction to such a degree that, although it has a thousand eyes, the celestial sphere has not seen his like'. And of all Sultan-Muhammad's works, it was this miniature that was sin- gled out by Dust Muhammad, a fellow painter and chronicler. 'It is such,' he wrote approvingly, 'that the lion-hearted of the jungle of depiction, and the leopards and crocodiles of the workshop of ornamenta- tion quail at the fangs of his pen and bend their necks before the awesomeness of his pictures.'
It really is an extraordinary sight, and as Dust Muhammad implies, among other things, a triumph of animal painting. Gayu- mars was in legend the first Shah of Persia, his kingdom an Edenic paradise until the demon Ahriman introduced evil. He there- fore holds court in the open air, cross- legged on a high, natural throne formed from violet, green, azure rocks resembling coral or tropical sponges more than any- thing you might expect to find in the moun- tains of Asia. The king and his courtiers are dressed in furs, mainly of snow-leopards; other living creatures are in attendance including deer, wild boar and lions, one of the last nestling peacefully in the arms of a burly retainer.
The more one looks, the more one sees. Hidden away in the stones, for example, are the faces of men and animals, as if the whole of nature were inhabited by spirits. In the centre of the circle of brilliantly coloured rock formations, sprouting like some exotic vegetation, is a flowery mead- ow much like the paradise gardens of Western art. Indeed, one way to think of Persian art — produced half-way down the Silk Road — is as intermediate between China and Europe.
Sultan-Muhammad's work has the float- ing sense of space of Chinese landscapes, in which the world unrolls horizontally or vertically rather than shooting way down the tramlines of Renaissance perspective. On the other hand, he has something of the naturalistic precision of Van Eyck. His colour sense, of course — those mauves, blues, golds and greens — is entirely Islam- ic and Persian. Later, the Western influ- ence preponderated in Persia, with results that are much less magical than those of the age of Sultan-Muhammad. A late 17th- century watercolour of two shepherds in a landscape is a strange hybrid Middle East- ern Giorgionesque.
The painters of Mogul India, however, included a higher proportion of Western ingredients in their aesthetic brew with results that were at best magnificent. To my mind, together with the Court of Gayu- mars, and other Persian miniatures of the 16th century — including five other sheets from the same manuscript by Sultan Muhammad and others — the highlights of the show are the Imperial Mogul minia- tures. The best of those come early too, in the late 16th and early 17th century.
The Emperor Jahangir looks down from an upper window of the Red Fort in Delhi in a sumptuous early 17th-century sheet ascribed to Abu'l Hasan. Below, attending this public audience or Darbar are numer- ous dignitaries, arranged, like the architec- ture, with more regard for European perspective — but only up to a point. Those in the middle ground, presumably more important, are larger than those at the front. The heads have something of the quality of Elizabethan portrait miniatures, but the colours — the browns and hot reds, oranges and yellows — are completely Indian.
It would be easy to go on describing delectable images. In a poetically crepuscu- lar picture, Prince Dara Shikuh, for exam- ple, son of Shah Jahan the builder of the Taj Mahal, embraces a lady friend on a ter- race at night (he was unfortunate enough to lose the struggle for succession, and so his severed head was later brandished in front of his aged father by his triumphant brother, Aurangzeb).
Like Persian painting, Mogul painting declined in later years, though it retained plenty of charm. Readers of William Dal- rymple's book City of Djinns, with its mem- orable evocations of 19th-century Delhi, will be interested in such pictures as the two of pretty nautch-girls clad in flared trousers and little else, one of which bears the touching inscription 'No 43 Kander Bukhsh, a celebrated dancing woman of Dehlee, once considered very beautiful, in the usual undress'.
These come from an album compiled for William Fraser, a Scot from Inverness who settled in India, became a Sanskrit scholar, wore his moustache in the Rajput manner, fathered 'as many children as the King of Persia' from his harem of wives, and delighted in lion-hunting on foot with a spear. Of nautch-girls he was clearly a con- noisseur.
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