A Prince, perhaps Sultan Parviz, with Female Companions

Here is a painting of quite exceptional refinement.  A prince is being waited on by his womenfolk.  His favorite lady beside him takes off the cover of the cup she is holding out to him on a golden tray, and he reaches out his hand to pick it up.  An attendant seated on the carpet in front of the dais pours wine from a flask into another vessel on a tray. Another attendant brings jasmine garlands in a dish, while a third stands behind the prince waving a chauri but looking out of the picture and very bored.  All the cups, flasks, and vessels are of gold inset with jewels, while porcelain and jade vessels are also at hand.  Three female musicians entertain the prince with a vina, drum, and one clapping, who is presumably also singing.  The prince and his companion are seated on a blue rug with floral arabesques spread on a wooden dais under a red canopy supported by four poles, while the three ladies in front are on a red rug with white latticing and floral motifs.  A green background yields to a blue sky above.  The profile of the drum player is especially notable as she sways in ecstasy tilting her head slightly

While the prince wears a sumptuous brocade jama decorated with a pattern of interlocking stars and hexagons, his companion’s attire is plainer—a plain white skirt with a delicate muslin peshvaj worn over it decorated with dots grouped in a diaper pattern.  Over her head and shoulders is a dupatta of dark blue with stylized flowers.  A brocade patka is tucked into her waistband.  The other women’s attire is plainer still—unpatterned skirts in orange, violet, dark green, brown, purple, and sage green with plain bodices and dupattas or diaphanous orhnis.  The textiles are modelled and draped with great care and skill, especially the dupattas and orhnis, each one being in an individual arrangement that suggests accurate observation.

While the young prince is not really like Jahangir (b. 1569) as he was at his accession in 1605, this could perhaps be an idealized portrait of him when he was younger.  The prince does however bear a considerable resemblance to Sultan Parviz (b. 1590), Jahangir’s second son, playing polo with his father and brother Khurram, almost certainly by Manohar, and added about 1611 to Jahangir’s Divan of Hafiz now in the British Library.  Parviz there is wearing a very similar and unusual gold brocade jama, although our prince lacks Parviz’s slightly aquiline nose as seen there.

Although attributed to Manohar in a later inscription, neither the composition nor the style of this painting matches other work by Manohar in this period.  Instead it seems a work that can confidently be attributed to Bishndas, a budding young artist whose work first appears in Jahangir’s Anvar-i Suhayli of 1603/04-11, also in the British Library.  For the modelling of female faces Bishndas invented a certain type of wide, jowly face with a sharp nose, features which are absent from his men’s faces.  In fact the women in our painting bear some considerable resemblance to those in Bishndas’s work, especially those in profile and those in three-quarter profile with just a little of the further eye showing as in our drum player, a type he was fond of in his early work (two examples are in the painting just cited).  Similar too are his women’s costumes and his penchant for mostly pastel shades in solid blocks of color without patterns and his diaphanous shawls over all.

Bishndas is, however, conscious of the work of the older artist Manohar, who had invented the Mughal group portrait only a few years earlier, as in portraits of Akbar with courtiers in Dublin, Cincinnati, and elsewhere.  Our artist has taken the type of the important figure somewhat elevated under a canopy with figures on either side and in front and perhaps at the back and here applied it to a prince and to his women.  Manohar also used this format for retrospective portraits, as in his double portrait of circa 1605 formerly in the Lloyd collection of Akbar’s younger sons princes Murad and Daniyal under a canopy, which could have served as a model for Bishndas’s work here.