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Lot Essay
Timur visited the saint Baba Sanku in Andkhud in Khorasan (modern-day Andkhoy in north west Afghanistan) at the end of the year AH 782⁄1381 AD. The saint threw Timur a roast breast of meat, which Timur interpreted as an auspicious omen, since Khorassan was known as the ‘breast of the world’ (For a translation of this episode, see Cherefeddin Ali (Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi), The History of Timur Bec, 2 vols., London, 1723, vol.1, p.78).
Baba Sanku was a member of a sect of dervishes who make a profession of appearing to be mad. The 1723 translation of the Zafarnama has the wonderful footnote that states that they “are natural fools or blockheads, or at least pretend to be so; the Mahometans have an extraordinary veneration for them, esteeming them saints. They say that God loved them before their creation and on that account did not endue them with reason, so that they are incapable of offending”.
Manohar is an artist who has been studied in considerable detail over the past fifty years, with a number of articles andmonographs devoted to him (principal among these are Glenn D Lowry, “Manohar” in Milo Cleveland Beach, The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India: 1600-1660, Williamstown, Mass., 1978, pp.130-137, Terence McInerney, “Manohar”, in Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, ed. Pratapaditya Pal, Bombay: Marg Publications, 1991, pp.53-68, and particularly the most recent and exhaustive survey, John Seyller “Manohar” in Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer and B. N. Goswamy (eds.), Masters of Indian Painting 1100-1650, Zurich: Artibus Asiae, 2011, pp.135-153). He was born into the position, being the son of the leading artist of the later Akbari atelier, Basawan. His early years in this position probably allowed him better opportunities than might otherwise have been the case, but he also demonstrated his prowess from an early age. It has been suggested that a portrait of an artist at the end of the Gulistan of Sa’di dating from 1582 was a self-portrait, but John Seyller attributes the work to his father Basawan. It is certain that from an early age he was entrusted with portraits so that in the 1584 Tarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriyya (Khoda Baksh Public Library, Patna, no.551; HL 107) he was employed as a portraitist working on his father’s design, and including his own portrait as that of Badi’uz-zaman embracing his father. A year later he was working on the Khamsa of Nizami (Keir Collection at Dallas Museum of Art, K.1.2014.18), again working up his father’s design, followed by commissions for the circa 1588 Diwan of Hafiz (Raza library Rampur, P3277), and the 1591 Baburnama.
By 1595 his style was fully developed and in the Khamsa of Nizami of that year (British Library, London, Or.12208) he contributed three folios including the prestigious initial one. His involvement in the 1596 Jami al-Tawarikh (Golestan Palace Library, Tehran, 2254-0347) was only two pages, one of which he designed. In 1598 he was sufficiently confident of his abilities to include his own self-portrait alongside that of the great calligrapher `Abd al-Rahim al-Harawi, Anbarin Qalam at the end of the Hadiqat al-Haqiqat of 1599-1600 (Private Collection, sold Bonham’s 26 April 1995, lot 400). He also included his portrait into the lower right-hand corner of an imperial durbar scene intended for the Jahangirnama (now in the St Petersburg Muraqqa’) previously attributed to Abu’l-Hasan (Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, King of the World, the Padshahnama, Washington DC: Sackler Gallery and London: Azimuth Editions, 1997, fig.13, p.119). At the end of Akbar’s reign he contributed to the Khamsa of Amir Khusrau, the Gulistan of Sa’di, with various paintings in the 1604 Akbarnama (four of which are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and he painted a wonderfully sensitive portrait of the elderly emperor Akbar (Akbar in old age, circa 1604 in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Beach 1978 op.cit. fig.11, p.133).
He had close links with various members of the Imperial family in addition to the emperor. He painted a series of portraits of Prince Murad and in 1600 had gone with the exiled Prince Salim to Allahabad where he worked for four years. On his return, his work changed and he concentrated more on single paintings; his style with its increased realism was exactly the taste of the new emperor Jahangir. He painted a number of works portraying the emperor in increasingly elaborate audience scenes, intended to be a part of the Jahangirnama (mostly now in the Raza Library, Rampur, Barbara Schmitz and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai, Mughal and Persian Paintings and Illustrated manuscripts in the Raza Library, Rampur, Album I esp pl.5; also Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 14.657). These allowed him to demonstrate his prowess as a portrait painter, each face individually observed, with great sensitivity. One of these, in Boston, is probably his final work. John Seyller has determined that it had to be finished by Abu’l Hasan after his death in around 1624.
The present painting was done just as he had fully matured his early style. Its feeling of space is typical of the increased openness of his painting when compared to that of his father. It also demonstrates his separated figures, each in his place, with none of the intense activity visible in the works of many of his contemporaries. This painting was done a couple of years before he left with Prince Salim to Allahabad; it is indicative that in this original manuscript that is so full of conflict and armies, he was asked to paint a scene of a Sufi in a landscape, a subject that very much played to Prince Salim’s interests.
Baba Sanku was a member of a sect of dervishes who make a profession of appearing to be mad. The 1723 translation of the Zafarnama has the wonderful footnote that states that they “are natural fools or blockheads, or at least pretend to be so; the Mahometans have an extraordinary veneration for them, esteeming them saints. They say that God loved them before their creation and on that account did not endue them with reason, so that they are incapable of offending”.
Manohar is an artist who has been studied in considerable detail over the past fifty years, with a number of articles andmonographs devoted to him (principal among these are Glenn D Lowry, “Manohar” in Milo Cleveland Beach, The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India: 1600-1660, Williamstown, Mass., 1978, pp.130-137, Terence McInerney, “Manohar”, in Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, ed. Pratapaditya Pal, Bombay: Marg Publications, 1991, pp.53-68, and particularly the most recent and exhaustive survey, John Seyller “Manohar” in Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer and B. N. Goswamy (eds.), Masters of Indian Painting 1100-1650, Zurich: Artibus Asiae, 2011, pp.135-153). He was born into the position, being the son of the leading artist of the later Akbari atelier, Basawan. His early years in this position probably allowed him better opportunities than might otherwise have been the case, but he also demonstrated his prowess from an early age. It has been suggested that a portrait of an artist at the end of the Gulistan of Sa’di dating from 1582 was a self-portrait, but John Seyller attributes the work to his father Basawan. It is certain that from an early age he was entrusted with portraits so that in the 1584 Tarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriyya (Khoda Baksh Public Library, Patna, no.551; HL 107) he was employed as a portraitist working on his father’s design, and including his own portrait as that of Badi’uz-zaman embracing his father. A year later he was working on the Khamsa of Nizami (Keir Collection at Dallas Museum of Art, K.1.2014.18), again working up his father’s design, followed by commissions for the circa 1588 Diwan of Hafiz (Raza library Rampur, P3277), and the 1591 Baburnama.
By 1595 his style was fully developed and in the Khamsa of Nizami of that year (British Library, London, Or.12208) he contributed three folios including the prestigious initial one. His involvement in the 1596 Jami al-Tawarikh (Golestan Palace Library, Tehran, 2254-0347) was only two pages, one of which he designed. In 1598 he was sufficiently confident of his abilities to include his own self-portrait alongside that of the great calligrapher `Abd al-Rahim al-Harawi, Anbarin Qalam at the end of the Hadiqat al-Haqiqat of 1599-1600 (Private Collection, sold Bonham’s 26 April 1995, lot 400). He also included his portrait into the lower right-hand corner of an imperial durbar scene intended for the Jahangirnama (now in the St Petersburg Muraqqa’) previously attributed to Abu’l-Hasan (Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, King of the World, the Padshahnama, Washington DC: Sackler Gallery and London: Azimuth Editions, 1997, fig.13, p.119). At the end of Akbar’s reign he contributed to the Khamsa of Amir Khusrau, the Gulistan of Sa’di, with various paintings in the 1604 Akbarnama (four of which are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and he painted a wonderfully sensitive portrait of the elderly emperor Akbar (Akbar in old age, circa 1604 in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Beach 1978 op.cit. fig.11, p.133).
He had close links with various members of the Imperial family in addition to the emperor. He painted a series of portraits of Prince Murad and in 1600 had gone with the exiled Prince Salim to Allahabad where he worked for four years. On his return, his work changed and he concentrated more on single paintings; his style with its increased realism was exactly the taste of the new emperor Jahangir. He painted a number of works portraying the emperor in increasingly elaborate audience scenes, intended to be a part of the Jahangirnama (mostly now in the Raza Library, Rampur, Barbara Schmitz and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai, Mughal and Persian Paintings and Illustrated manuscripts in the Raza Library, Rampur, Album I esp pl.5; also Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 14.657). These allowed him to demonstrate his prowess as a portrait painter, each face individually observed, with great sensitivity. One of these, in Boston, is probably his final work. John Seyller has determined that it had to be finished by Abu’l Hasan after his death in around 1624.
The present painting was done just as he had fully matured his early style. Its feeling of space is typical of the increased openness of his painting when compared to that of his father. It also demonstrates his separated figures, each in his place, with none of the intense activity visible in the works of many of his contemporaries. This painting was done a couple of years before he left with Prince Salim to Allahabad; it is indicative that in this original manuscript that is so full of conflict and armies, he was asked to paint a scene of a Sufi in a landscape, a subject that very much played to Prince Salim’s interests.