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One of the first things I did when I arrived at Amherst College was to ask the staff @meadartmuseum to see everything in the collection from South Asia. They kindly obliged & showed me lots of cool stuff, but one thing in particular made my jaw drop. A short thread...
Here it is--AC 1963.4--a painting on paper measuring around 42.5 x 31.7 cm. Looks like just a bunch of guys standing around a white building. BUT, the Persian inscription above IDs the scene as the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb visiting the shrine of Mu'in al-Din Chishti in Ajmer!
What's so interesting about this? Firstly, we have no other depictions of Aurangzeb visiting a Sufi shrine. And secondly, Aurangzeb is said to have ceased patronizing painting, effectively dismantling the royal workshop by the late 1660s.
Well, whether Aurangzeb was an iconoclast or a Hater of Paintings, as many have previously claimed, is up for debate. In any case, I'm pretty sure this painting was only made at the end of the 17th or early 18th c., perhaps for one of Aurangzeb's sons.
Two of Aurangzeb's sons, Bahadur Shah (r. 1707-12) and A'zam Shah (r. 1707), are actually portrayed (and ID'd in the same Persian hand) in the right half of the painting.
Note, too, that the shrine in the painting looks _nothing_ like the actual dargah in Ajmer. It more so resembles early 18C Mughal architecture in Delhi like the Moti Masjid in Mehrauli, built by--surprise--Bahahur Shah.
And yet, the painter has portrayed an OSTRICH EGG suspended inside the shrine, which is not as weird as it may seem nor it is so uncommon, but this is as practice associated more so with the Deccan, less so with northern India.
Here are multiple ostrich eggs hanging inside of a Sufi shrine in Khuldabad, near Aurangabad:
So, we have a painting of an emperor who is not known for paintings of Sufi shrines, & the shrine itself resembles early 18C Mughal architecture with a Deccani twist. This isn't so strange, in fact. Painters traveled, after all, & the Mughals were campaigning in the Deccan.
Who commissioned the painting, and why? And for what context (album? manuscript?) was it made? I don't YET know. I have some theories, but until I can see the reverse side of the painting, they remain purely speculative.
Why can't we remove the much later, probably 20th-c. frame? Conservators are concerned that doing so may damage the painting. Fair enough. But then how can we learn more about the painting's provenance? Well, there's a little clue that I was slow to discover...
...et voila! Turns out there's a monogram located in the lower right corner -- I've circled it here in case you missed it! Now, I'm much more used to deciphering Persian inscriptions, which is why it took me a while to figure out that this reads "W.E." Ho-hum, right?
I never in a million years thought I would figure out who W.E. was, except to conclude that they were probably not a member of the Mughal family. But then I learned about a really neat tool: the Frits Lugt Collectors’ Marks on Prints and Drawings database https://www.fondationcustodia.fr/Collectors-Marks
And that's where I ended up plugging in W + E, and this is what popped up (you see it yet?)
Thanks to the database, I now knew that WE was William Esdaile (1758-1837), son of the lord mayor of London, banker, and print collector!
Sadly, in this portrait (Nat'l Portrait Gallery, NPG 4660) he's shown holding a book of European drawings (?), not the Mughal painting in @meadartmuseum that he added his monogram to...
But guess what else he monogrammed? Well, Esdaile was a big collector of Rembrandt prints and drawings. So, you'll find W.E. on the Mead Mughal painting, but also on this drawing that Rembrandt made c. 1654-6 (Morgan Library) AFTER a Mughal painting!
Which brings us full circle (I think?). I still don't know why/where the Mead painting was made nor by/for whom, but I can say that through some twist of fate, a London collector came to acquire it, & for some amount of time it lived with Rembrandt's drawing of a Mughal noble.
Want to learn more? On Aurangzeb, see @AudreyTruschke's _Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth_ (where the Mead painting made its publication debut); Malini Roy ( @BL_VisualArts) on Aurangzeb's patronage of painting...
and for the Rembrandt-Mughal connection, Stephanie Schrader, ed., _Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India_, the catalogue that accompanied this fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition at the Getty mounted in 2018. Fin! https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/rembrandt_india/
Let me also give a shout-out to Mila Hruba (not on Twitter, as far as I know), the Mead Art Museum study room manager, print specialist, and perpetual obliger of my many requests to view objects in the collections.
To clarify: Aurangzeb definitely visited the Ajmer shrine! Musta’id Khan, in the Ma’asir-i Alamgiri, notes 3 such occasions on September 25, 1679; March 22, 1680; & January 13, 1681 & there were probably many more, but this is the only painting I know of that depicts this event.
