Provenance:
European Private Collection
In a rocky defile above a mountain pass a lion hunt is coming to an end in a frenzy of activity. A mounted hunter has just speared his lion, who lies bleeding out before the path of his galloping horse. Another mounted horseman is drawing his sword, while of the two hunters on foot, the archer has lodged an arrow in the wounded lion’s brow and prepares to shoot again, while another hunter bringing up the rear thrusts forward his wrapped-up arm and brandishes his sword. The hunt is not yet over, however, for a lioness turns to roar her defiance at the men who have brought her mate low. Below the defile a road snakes down to a bridge over a torrent that rushes past a village occupying the gap between two mountain masses, between which we are afforded glimpses of less-rugged terrain beyond.
Prince Salim, like his father, was very fond of hunting and, as did all Mughal princes, regarded the lion hunt as the greatest form of sport. When in his rebellious period at Allahabad 1600-04, he had an album made of pictures of his hunts. Of the known pages most show piles of dead animals with Salim inspecting them—deer, nilgai, even rhinoceroses—but only one, in the Chester Beatty Library, shows a dead lion. Others of these hunting scenes are in the San Diego and Los Angeles museums and the Keir collection. Jahangir kept records of all the animals slain by him personally, and he records the number slain by his 38th year as 17,167! So hunting pictures became something of a vogue in the early years of the 17th century.
While it seems unlikely that our principal hunter is meant to represent Jahangir, a rather similar painting of a lion hunt is in the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., showing a mounted hunter slashing at a lion’s head with his sword. Milo Beach writes that the hunter may be a depiction of Salim. Beach attributes that painting to Muhammad Sharif, the son of the Safavid artist ‘Abd al-Samad, who is known as an artist from occasional paintings but who is mentioned in Jahangir’s memoirs principally as a friend from childhood and an administrator. Beach’s attribution is based on another painting in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, of Salim visiting a Sufi saint in the wilderness, which has an inscription naming him as the artist. He was a somewhat old-fashioned artist by 1600, favoring piled-up mountainous rocks and with views of distant towns in between, as is the case in this painting, and with similarly heavy overall tonality. His way of depicting rocky terrain with regular criss-crossing of their outlines is found in all three paintings. One of our subsidiary figures, the man advancing with a wrapped-up left arm and brandishing a sword, is also found in the Freer Gallery picture. The artist is advanced enough, however, to depict all the figures in full profile, a manner carried over from Mughal portraiture that was coming into vogue at this time for all narrative pictures.
