A prince and his retinue meeting a sage while on a hunting expedition

Mughal, circa 1590-1600

Footnotes

Provenance
Private UK collection: acquired from Prahlad Bubbar.

The theme of a prince meeting a sage or dervish while out hunting or riding is a recurring one in Mughal painting. Sheila Canby has suggested that this was a result of the increasing need for religious tolerance, as Mughal hegemony encountered more and more diverse faiths; and also a concern with the business of the ruler taking spiritual advice, of being a philosopher-king. Here we see the exemplum of the man of action pausing in his activities to greet the man of wisdom in the wilderness. (See S. R. Canby, Princes, Poets and Paladins: Islamic and Indian Paintings from the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, London 1998, p. 111, in relation to no. 81, a painting depicting a prince and a hermit, dated to circa 1580).

For other examples of this theme, see Simon Ray, Indian and Islamic Works of Art, November 2016, no. 44, a prince visiting an ascetic, dated circa 1610 (published in M. C. Beach, The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India 1600-1660, Williamstown 1978, pp. 163-164, no. 61, and now in the David Collection, Copenhagen); Simon Ray, November 2018, pp. 86-91, no. 12, dated to 1625-50, in which the rather more subdued prince seated before the holy man is accompanied by an entourage carrying arrows and other weapons wrapped in cloth, as in our painting.

There are also two examples discussed by P. Pal, in Indian Painting: a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, vol. I, 1000-1700, Los Angeles 1993. The first is a musician in a landscape, dated circa 1600, in which a musician clearly copied from a European print sits beneath a tree in a landscape, but who simultaneously resembles the sage in our painting, and who sits on a tiger skin painted in a very similar manner (pp. 240-241, no. 62). The second is a drawing, with some colour, attributed to Miskin, circa 1600-1605, with a Jahangir-like prince dismounted from his horse in a rocky landscape, surrounded by a small colony of bearded sages and half-naked sadhus (pp. 242-243, no. 63).

Finally, the purple and green rocks, the tree, and the goat in the background can be compared with a painting attributable to Hiranand, 1600-10, from the De Luynes Album, in Francesca Galloway, J. P. Losty, A Prince's Eye, London 2013, pp. 76-77, no. 4.