SIGNED MAHMUD MUZAHHIB, SHAYBANID BUKHARA, CIRCA 1550

Mahmud Muzahhib was undoubtedly the most important artist of his generation in Bukhara and the leading proponent of the Bukhara school of painting under the Shaybanids, especially the great bibliophile Sultan ‘Abd al-Aziz. He was accomplished in all the arts of the book although, as is typical in the west, it is his painting that has been most studied. Binyon, Wilkinson and Gray note that he was ‘the best and apparently the leading miniaturist of the so-called Bukhara school’ (Laurence Binyon, J.V.S.Wilkinson and Basil Gray, Persian Miniature Painting, New York, 1971 reprint, p.106). He was the leading individual artist at a court whose opulence and artistic sensibility was compared to that of Sultan Husayn Mirza at Herat.

Although Mahmud Muzahhib is known to have illustrated a number of manuscripts (for instance folios from a Gulistan of Sa’di, folios from which were sold in these Rooms as part of the Private Collection Donated to Benefit the University of Oxford, Part II, 4 October 2012, lot 12, 13 and 14), he is also known to have done a small number of full page paintings, similar to ours. Four comparable paintings are in the Museum of the Astan-e Qods-i Razavi, Mashhad. They were studied by Binyon and Bahari and three are signed in the usual way by Mahmud, ‘amal-I Mahmud Muzahhib as found here (Binyon et al., op.cit., p.122). Like ours they are all studies of single or pairs of figures, with subjects including ‘Three Damsels from China’, ‘A Youth offering an apple to a lady’, an Angel, and a portrait of Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i.