Mughal painting is no stranger to the museum gallery, or to the exhibition catalogue. Persian Miniature Painting (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), the publication that followed the seminal 1931 exhibition of Persianate art held at Burlington House, London, featured entries for paintings by the sixteenth-century Mughal masters ‘Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid ‘Ali, as well as for two folios from the large-scale Hamzanama (Book of Hamza) manuscript produced for Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Mughal painting really came into its own decades later, thanks in large part to The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India: 1600–1660 (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 1978) and The Imperial Image: Paintings for the Mughal Court (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1981), both produced for major exhibitions mounted in the United States under the curatorial direction of Milo Cleveland Beach. The 1980s saw an even greater proliferation of Mughal painting exhibitions and exhibition catalogues, including The Indian Heritage: Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982), Anvari’s Divan: A Pocket Book for Akbar (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal Court (New York: Asia Society, 1985), The Emperors’ Album: Images of Mughal India (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), and Miniatures de l’Inde impériale: Les peintres de la cour d’Akbar (1556–1605) (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1989). The brisk pace of museum exhibitions and catalogues continued through the 1990s and early 2000s. Even with this prodigious output, however, a glaring lacuna persisted: not a single Mughal exhibition gave more than limited attention to paintings produced after Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), save for the recent India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010), one facet of which examined the legacy of Mughal painting in Awadh during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (click here for review). This omission would be understandable were it not the case that Mughal court artists remained active—and demonstrably so—until 1857, the year that the last emperor, Bahadur Shah II (d. 1862), was exiled to Burma (now Myanmar) and the long-lived dynasty thus extinguished.

For these reasons, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 is an extremely welcome addition to the existing corpus of scholarship, and, with its copious full-color illustrations, will no doubt serve as a fundamental resource for experts and students alike. Bringing together essays by art historians, historians, and a literature specialist, the volume also offers an illuminating, interdisciplinary perspective on this culturally and politically heterogeneous period. The brevity of the six essays—they take up only fifty-one pages in contrast to the catalogue entries’ one hundred and twenty-three—suggests that comprehensiveness was not a primary goal. Rather, by examining in brief a broad range of artistic materials and agents (artists, poets, royals, colonial administrators, mercenaries, and others), the authors point to, but do not purport to survey in full, the era’s vast complexities. In this way, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 provides non-specialists a coherent and visually compelling entrée to the period, at the same time that it offers specialists a valuable critical reassessment of cultural patronage and practice—courtly versus non-courtly, “Mughal” versus “Company”—in the royal city.

The introduction, co-written by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, presents a summary account of the political history, from the establishment of Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58) to the tumult of Bahadur Shah II’s last years. The authors also address some of the key shifts in artistic practice and patronage that accompanied and were often triggered by the rise and fall of Mughal royalty and their European counterparts. They explain, for example, that the political instability that followed the death of the long-reigning Emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748), whom Dalrymple and Sharma credit with “reunifying the Mughal atelier and patronizing a new surge of imperial painting,” led to an exodus of painters and poets from Delhi to the provinces (4). From the latter part of the reign of Shah ‘Alam II (r. 1759–1806), Mughal patronage of painters in Delhi was once again revived; though, as Dalrymple and Sharma observe, these artists were also supported “by the city’s European residents, and by the courts around Delhi, providing many extraordinary points of interaction” (10). Following from this, the authors make a compelling case for dispensing with traditional art-historical distinctions between Company school and Mughal court artists, which, they argue, “are actually meaningless, certainly in Delhi at this period, as the same artists were working in similar styles for very different patrons” (10). This notion of “parallel patronage” between “Mughal and non-Mughal, courtly and non-courtly” lends great texture and complexity to this exciting, understudied period of artistic production, and represents a bold departure from earlier scholarship (10).

The opening essay by Malini Roy eloquently adumbrates the wide range of courtly paintings—from portraits and illustrations for manuscripts to ragamala sets—that were produced in Delhi during the reign of Muhammad Shah. While Roy posits that “the painting atelier flourished through the leadership of khanazad or palace-born artists Kalyan Das, Chitarman, and Hunhar,” it is the emperor, she stresses, who “would breathe life back into the Mughal painting tradition, which had rapidly fallen into decline during the reign of his puritanical ancestor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707)” (17). Recent studies paint a different picture. In uncovering its dubious origins, Katherine Butler Schofield, for example, has challenged the widespread perception of Aurangzeb as an orthodox anti-aesthete (Katherine Butler Schofield (née Brown), “Did Aurangzeb Ban Music? Questions for the Historiography of his Reign,” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 77–120). Chanchal Dadlani has offered another corrective to the received view, showing that Aurangzeb used, rather than eschewed, architecture and architectural ornament to reshape Mughal identity (Chanchal Dadlani, “‘Twilight’ in Delhi? Architecture, Aesthetics, and Urbanism in the late Mughal Empire,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009). Terence McInerney, meanwhile, has argued that the early eighteenth-century Mughal atelier was plagued less by decline than a general lack of stylistic focus under the short-lived patronage of emperors Bahadur Shah I (r. 1707–12) and Farrukhsiyar (r. 1713–19) (Terence McInerney, “Mughal Painting during the Reign of Muhammad Shah,” in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed., Barbara Schmitz, Mumbai: Marg, 2002, 12–33). Muhammad Shah’s prolonged reign, in contrast, provided a more stable environment in which a single painting mode—pioneered, McInerney emphasizes, by the court artist Chitarman—could flourish. The painter’s role in creating artistic taste clearly deserves more attention, as does the patronage of other members of the court, such as the vizier I‘timad al-Dawla Qamar al-Din Khan, who, Roy explains, presented to Muhammad Shah a lavishly illustrated manuscript of Rai Anand Ram Mukhlis’s Persian romance, Karnama-i ‘ishq. With its competing pools of patrons—from emperors and princes to begums and viziers—the Mughal court of the first half of the eighteenth century generated its own intricate networks of “parallel patronage,” which artists, by necessity, also navigated.

The essay by Jean-Marie Lafont, which follows Roy’s, offers a vivid and sweeping account of Mughal and French relations in Delhi during the long reign of Shah ‘Alam II. French officers not only offered their services in training Mughal corps in the French style of warfare and in defending against Maratha military incursions, they also collected Indian manuscripts and paintings, prefiguring British Company patronage by a number of decades. The French interest in South Asian book arts, as Lafont has argued previously, dates to the seventeenth century (Jean-Marie Lafont, “The Quest of Indian Manuscripts by the French in 18th Century,” in Indo-French Relations: History and Perspectives, New Delhi: Maison des sciences de l’Homme et Ambassade de France en Inde, 1991, 1–35). The eighteenth century, however, saw the rise of great firangi (European) patrons like Colonel Jean-Baptiste Gentil and the Franco-Swiss Antoine-Louis Polier, whose collections of Mughal manuscripts and architectural renderings are some of the finest of the period. As Lafont makes clear, Delhi did not exist in a bubble. Both Gentil and Polier, and many of the artists who worked for them, had close ties with Awadh. In Delhi itself, marriage, literary, and other alliances spurred the growth of distinctly Indo-French cultural spheres. For a fuller examination of this rich subject, one must turn to Lafont’s other publications, such as the recent The French and Delhi: Agra, Aligarh, and Sardhana (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2010), co-authored with Rehana Lafont.

In the volume’s third essay, Sunil Sharma addresses the production of multilingual literary and nonliterary texts in Delhi during the British political ascendancy of the nineteenth century. Delhi had long been a major center of textual production, though one whose existence was intimately and integrally tied to the Mughal court. The expansion of Company rule in South Asia saw the rise of a pool of British patrons in the Mughal capital, as well as a “new kind of writing that combined topography, biography, and ethnography” (35). Mirza Sangin Beg’s Sair al-manazil (1828), a topographical survey of the city’s monuments, which bears a dedication to Sir Charles Metcalfe, the British Resident in Delhi between 1811–18 and 1825–27, is one telling example. Even more fascinating are the Tashrih al-aqvam and the Tazkirat al-umara, two works in this new genre that were authored by the Anglo-Indian Colonel James Skinner and illustrated by Delhi artists like Ghulam ‘Ali Khan (active 1817–55). Ghulam ‘Ali Khan often joined Skinner on his sojourns, and likely rendered many of the portraits in the British Library manuscript of the Tashrih al-aqvam from life. Sharma observes that these watercolor paintings “are done in a realistic manner that reflects the ethnographic quality of the text” (38). This remark invites further investigation. How, for example, do words and images—writer and painter—work in tandem to produce this realistic effect? Sharma’s essay, in this way and in others, cogently points to the many rich avenues illustrated texts offer for the study of late Mughal Delhi.

Yuthika Sharma’s essay, the fourth in the volume, explores the career of Ghulam ‘Ali Khan in greater scope. In addition to working for Skinner, Ghulam ‘Ali Khan found employ with Company officer William Fraser, patron of a now-famous, dispersed album that bears his name. (Sharma discusses selections from the Fraser Album in cat. nos. 41, 44–45, and 48.) He also enjoyed the patronage of the Mughal court and, during the last decades of his career, the Nawab of Jhajjar and the Raja of Alwar. Touching upon a number of Ghulam ‘Ali Khan’s commissions—from darbar and topographical scenes to manuscript illustrations and genre studies—Sharma underscores the painter’s agency in negotiating a multiplicity of patrons, ideologies, and artistic modes. By simultaneously emphasizing the fluidity among these categories, in particular the latter, Sharma offers an important rejoinder to more traditional scholarship, which has insisted on regarding early nineteenth-century Mughal, Rajput, and Company painting as distinctly separate entities.

In a similar vein, J. P. Losty’s essay sheds light on the roles that Ghulam ‘Ali Khan and younger artists like Mazhar ‘Ali Khan and Mirza Shah Rukh Beg (both active ca. 1840–55) played in pictorializing the Delhi cityscape for a range of patrons, from the Mughal emperor Akbar II to Company liaison Sir Thomas Metcalfe and the Delhi jurist Syed Ahmed Khan. The key to these artists’ professional successes lay not only in their technical prowess, but also in their capacities to gauge the interests and needs of a wide-ranging clientele, and to calibrate their artistic practices accordingly. That the topographical mode of depiction figures in so many of the major commissions of the period attests less to the presumed dilution of Mughal painting—this appraisal of the artistic tradition, in any case, warrants reevaluation—than to the dramatic turns that colored the political and cultural climate of Delhi at this time. Losty’s illuminating essay shows that artists not only rode out these shifts, but also played an active part in shaping them.

Dalrymple’s essay, the last in the volume, is rooted in the final, fateful years of Bahadur Shah II’s reign leading up to the uprising of 1857 and the emperor’s death, in exile, six years later. In spite of tremendous political and economic strain—a consequence of British military aggressions—Delhi experienced a cultural efflorescence during the 1850s. Poetry in particular flourished, due, in part, to the patronage of the emperor, who was himself an accomplished poet in multiple languages. The art of painting also enjoyed a resurgence at the Mughal court. With the subsequent loss of royal patronage, and the emperor in particular, Delhi’s cultural life suffered. Dalrymple opines, “without the emperor there to act as a focus and, to some extent, catalyst, the driving force behind great Delhi’s renaissance and artistic flourishing was gone. The beating heart of Indo-Islamic civilization had been ripped out, and could not be replaced” (66). As the closing remarks of Losty’s essay reveal, however, the painting school in Delhi continued, though in a modified form (see, e.g., cat. nos. 95–96 in the volume). Ivory replaced paper as the preferred support, and European tourists, rather than emperors and nawabs, fueled the trade. The rising popularity of photography in India, from the 1850s onward, would also force painters to adapt their artistic practice in creative ways. The crisis for artists was not only political in nature, but technological, too.

The catalogue entries, written by Yuthika Sharma with Dalrymple, expand upon many of the figures, themes, and objects referenced in the essays. The large number of high-quality, full-page color illustrations facilitates close study of the exhibition materials. Some of these objects, however—an extraordinary woven patka (sash) (cat. no. 84) and photographs by Felice Beato (British, 1832–1909) (cat. nos. 90–93), for example—include little or no explication and, in this way, seem to function as illustrations of and backdrops to the exhibition’s broader historical narrative. Moreover, transliterations and translations of Persian and Urdu inscriptions are provided in many, though not all, of the entries (see, e.g., cat. no. 64). In one case, a minute Persian inscription in nasta‘liq script on a portrait of the Mughal prince Mirza Salim Bahadur (1799–1836) with the court aide Tarbiyat Khan (cat. no. 31) is transliterated, but not translated. The inscriptions on Ghulam ‘Ali Khan’s portrait of the Nawab of Jhajjar (r. 1845–57) (cat. no. 76), on the other hand, are unevenly transliterated and incompletely translated. These omissions aside, the catalogue is an exceptional scholarly resource. Students and non-specialists will also benefit from the maps, Mughal genealogy, and glossary found in the appendices.

In some ways, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 treads familiar territory. Stuart Cary Welch’s Room for Wonder: Indian Painting during the British Period, 1760–1880 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1978) and Mildred Archer’s Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1972), Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1992), and, with Toby Falk, India Revealed: The Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser, 1801–35 (London: Cassell, 1989) brought a number of the works and artists discussed here to scholarly and public attention. The achievement of the present volume, and what sets it apart from these earlier studies, is its innovative framing of the materials and the period. By focusing their lens on individual agents, the authors draw attention to the fluid nature of artistic practice in late Mughal Delhi, and, in turn, challenge the utility of categorizing painting as either “Company” or “Court.” Furthermore, by beginning the narrative in the seventeenth century—the catalogue opens with an illustrated folio from the Windsor Castle Padshahnama manuscript, whose production was initiated during the reign of Shah Jahan—the authors reveal a stylistic sensibility that, in spite of shifts in patronage, persisted over time. Political tides may wax and wane; artists, nevertheless, keep working.