A newly-discovered page from the Saint Petersburg Album: A female allegorical figure seated in a landscape, alongside a winged and grass-skirted peri, attributed to Abu'l Hasan and Manohar, laid down on a large illuminated album page, a fine calligraphic composition verso, copied by 'Imad al-Hasani

Mughal, the painting 1602-04 and 1605-10, with later additions in Persia, circa 1750-58, the calligraphy dated AH 1016/AD 1607-08

Footnotes

Provenance
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (1868-1918).
The Album presented by him to the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, 1910.
Private German collection, Upper Bavaria, since at least the 1970s.

The inscriptions verso are as follows:

At the top: parts of a munajat attributed to Khwajah 'Abdullah Ansari (d. AH 481/AD 1088).
The right-hand side: couplets from a ghazal of 'Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. AH 898/AD 1492), copied by 'Imad al-Hasani.
The left-hand side, in Arabic, couplets attributed to Imam 'Ali, copied by 'Imad al-Hasani in the capital Qazvin and dated AH 1016/AD 1607-08.

In the left outer margin: the signature of Muhammad Hadi, dated AH 1171/1757-58:
raqam-e bandeh muhammad hadi 1171, 'Drawing by the servant [of God], Muhammad Hadi 1171 (1757-8)'.

For Muhammad Hadi see Nasser D. Khalili, B. W. Robinson and T. Stanley, Lacquer of the Islamic Lands: Part One, London 1996, pp. 72, 144-146; and Karimzadeh Tabrizi, The Lives & Art of Old Painters of Iran, vol. III, London 1991, pp. 1098-1100.




The Saint Petersburg Album, Abu'l Hasan and Manohar
Professor John Seyller


This arresting painting presents two intriguing figures in a decidedly enigmatic situation. On the left of the scene, a nimbate, bare-chested European woman with tousled flaxen hair and an orange cap, presumably intended to evoke the Madonna, stares off to her right as she reclines directly on the ground of a verdant headland. A muscular right forearm pokes out from the sleeve of her ample, loose-fitting blue robe and falls lightly on one thigh. She completes the relaxed pose by resting a fully exposed left arm on a plump bolster laid diagonally across the arms and seat of a narrow, high-backed chair. In short, the woman now strikes a conspicuously casual position against an implausibly small piece of furniture in an incongruous environment.

If this physically imposing and quasi-religious figure is clearly derived from a particular but still unidentified allegorical or religious source in European art, her counterpart, positioned a few steps away to the right, comes unmistakably from an otherworldly realm.¹ She is a female peri, a kind of Islamic angel, identified as such by her oversized pair of wings, discreet breasts, and exotic headgear. She is, however, an unusual variant of these familiar celestial beings. Taller and more substantial in physique than the willowy peris popping up frequently in Mughal, Deccani, and Persian art, and endowed with unusually smooth, aerodynamic wings, she wears not the tunics and full-length robes typical of such creatures but is nude save for a voluminous leafy skirt bunched round her waist. Yet the remainder of her body is hardly sensuous, for it is sheathed subtly in a sort of feathery body suit that is oddly (and perhaps later) tinged a mossy green. This peri also uncharacteristically carries a heavy tome and offers a sprig of flowers to an attendant mongoose, an animal rarely seen in Mughal painting.

It is tempting to try to find in this improbable pairing of figures and their animal mascot some sort of coherent European model such as the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel informs Mary that she will give birth to the son of God. Yet the figures' positions and iconography depart in major ways from any known European model of that theme, with the woman here being neither fully dressed, nor seated upright, nor engrossed in prayer, and the peri or angel not raising a hand in salutation. Moreover, the mongoose is obviously unknown in putative Renaissance models.

Instead, these two beguiling figures come together by mere chance of post-production design. They are, in fact, the subjects of two separate paintings, related primarily by their exotic themes, being physically pieced together and expanded in Iran in the mid-18th century when an anonymous Persian compiler was tasked to make from a cache of existing Mughal paintings an attractive and space-filling composition for a new album. Straight-line crackling along the join between the paintings is irrefutable physical evidence of that process. Careful examination of the painting's surface reveals that the two works meet just to the right of the chair; the original painting on the left ends below at a horizontal line that proceeds leftward from that vertical join through the middle of the row of rocks exactly where they line the shore. Similarly, the upper edge of the peri painting passes just above the skein of birds directly above the peri's proper left wing. The original painting terminates even more obviously below at a point between the two medium-sized boulders directly below the mongoose. Once the two Mughal paintings were attached to one another, the later Persian artist did his best to obscure the abrupt joins between them as well as those to the newly created extensions above and below by overpainting them with some distracting details, most notably, the slender sapling alongside the chair. Slight changes in colouration within the landscape and sky – especially the murky sward below the woman's blue robe – are also clues to this additive process.

Stylistic inconsistencies within the painting are further signs of the later expansion. For example, the exaggeratedly precise foliate clusters of the tall tree rising behind the woman and the line of amorphous stippled trees along the horizon would be anomalous features in any early 17th-century Mughal painting. It is practically certain, too, that the Queen Anne-style chair and the solid gold nimbus are later interpolations into the original Mughal painting; the addition of the former would explain the incongruous mismatch between the scale of woman and that of the adjacent furniture. Likewise, the leafy tendril that passes peculiarly round the peri's neck and intrusively over her breasts is so at odds with the nuanced execution of the remainder of that figure that it, too, must be an 18th-century garnish, one possibly driven by prurient concerns in Iran.

The artists

The two original parts of this painting are attributed here to different masters: Abu'l Hasan (active 1600-1630) and Manohar (active 1582-1624), two of the most esteemed Mughal artists of the late 16th and early 17th century.² Raised in the imperial painting workshop, each flourished under the tutelage of his father, Aqa Riza and Basawan, respectively, and worked for Prince Salim at his Allahabad court from 1600 to 1604. Abu'l Hasan in particular was an outright prodigy, beginning his career in 1600 at age thirteen with an extraordinary drawing made after the figure of St John in Dürer's Crucifixion.³ By far the closest comparisons to the reclining woman here are two other European-themed works still in the St Petersburg Album itself in Russia. One, signed by the young Abu'l Hasan and made explicitly for Prince (or Sultan) Salim, is painted directly over a monochromatic print of Timiditas, a female allegorical figure from the series The Four Temperaments by Johann Sadeler I after the Flemish artist Maarten de Vos.⁴ Abu'l Hasan enlists the same colourising process in his image of Dialectica, another allegorical figure, which also has a monumental woman at its centre.⁵ They share with the European woman in the present painting a richly opaque colouring with midtone – not black – shadows and black outlining within the folds of the voluminous robes, and a relatively dry surface; the latter differs from the softer, more fluid colour transitions in a nearly contemporary painting attributed to Manohar, Madonna and Child with a white cat, dated to about 1598.⁶ Likewise, the facial features of this woman have the same sculpted, even masklike quality, particularly around the eyes, as Abu'l Hasan's other allegorical females. Finally, the muscles of the European original remain quite pronounced, a feature especially evident in the forearms and hands. In short, this figure belongs to Abu'l Hasan's teenage years when he made several close copies or colourised versions of European prints, an experience that enabled him to break radically with his father's more traditional Persianate style.⁷

The amiable peri is attributed here to Manohar, a prolific and well-documented artist. Several distinctive features of this gentle celestial creature support the attribution. Peris come in many forms, but only Manohar renders them with their bodies covered in a thin layer of tiny feathers.⁸ And the peri's garb of an extraordinarily thick and naturalistic leafy lower garment has only one known counterpart, that worn by a cherubic figure in a painting attributed to Manohar, Tobias and the angel.⁹ The gentle landscape, which features a soft, weathered side of a sloping area and a delicate rocky ridge near the mongoose, is consistent with the rendering of analogous passages in the terrain in an attributed illustration in the Walters Art Museum Khamsa of Amir Khusraw.¹⁰ All this points to the work being produced at a time within a few years of Jahangir's accession in 1605.

The Saint Petersburg Album

The folio belonged to an album known as the St Petersburg Album (the Leningrad Album during the Soviet period), one of the landmarks of Indian and Persian painting. That album contained a hundred pictures in 1909, but some folios had already been removed by that time, and eventually entered collections in Europe and the United States.¹¹ The borders around the Bonhams painting are unlike those of the painted sides of other folios in the St Petersburg Album, which have marvellously delicate gold drawings of animals amid hills and trees, and are often ascribed to Muhammad Baqir, one of three known illuminators.¹² By contrast, the present borders are rendered in a more rudimentary, harder manner, and can only be modern imitations.

On the reverse of the folio is a customary page of calligraphy, in this case, an arrangement of three specimens, two signed by the eminent Persian calligrapher 'Imad al-Hasani, whose full name was Mir 'Imad ibn Ibrahim al-Hasani al-Saifi al-Qazvini (AH 961/AD 1553-54–AH 1024/AD 1615). The top panel in this calligraphic composition features parts of a munajat (confidential talks of 'Ali) attributed to Khwaja 'Abdullah Ansari (d. AH 481/AD 1088). In the panel to the right are couplets from a ghazal of 'Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. AH 898/AD 1492) and the signature of 'Imad al-Hasani, the only named calligrapher with calligraphic exercises and specimens in the St Petersburg Album. And on the left are couplets attributed to Imam 'Ali followed by a much smaller signature indicating that 'Imad al-Hasani wrote the piece in the capital Qazvin on the date of AH 1016/AD 1607-08.

A notoriously sharp-tongued person, Mir 'Imad had nearly as many detractors as admirers. Yet his work, particularly in nasta'liq script, was held in such high regard that he was considered the equal of Mir 'Ali, another calligrapher whose work was avidly sought for Mughal albums. Mir 'Imad had a strikingly peripatetic life, bouncing between Qazvin, his place of birth, and Tabriz, Herat, the Hejaz, Aleppo, and Isfahan; he returned frequently to Qazvin.¹³ The crowning achievement of his career came when he was made one of the personal calligraphers of Shah 'Abbas II. Yet that honour also inculcated sins of arrogance in him and aroused ruinous professional jealousies amongst his peers, ultimately causing Mir 'Imad to fall out of favour with the Shah, who at one point became so vexed by the calligrapher that he wished aloud that someone would kill him. To the Shah's belated chagrin, that nefarious deed was carried out on 30 Rajab 1024/25th August 1615.

Border decorations on the calligraphic side of the folio invariably consist of small golden flowers in looping foliate frames on a deep blue field. This example is signed minutely at the intersection of the inner and lower borders by the illuminator and dated AH 1171/AD 1757-58; the formulaic signature reads 'written by the humblest of slaves, Muhammad Hadi'. Together with Muhammad Baqir and Muhammad Sadiq, Muhammad Hadi was responsible for most decorative borders in the St Petersburg Album and was solely responsible for those around calligraphic specimens.¹⁴ His contributions to the Album itself range in date from AH 1160/AD 1747 to AH 1172/AD 1758-59, but his known work has a still greater chronological span, that is, from AH 1148/AD 1735-36 to AH 1230/AD 1814, a remarkably long career corroborated by eyewitness accounts of an extremely aged artist by that name still living in Shiraz in 1821.¹⁵

Bonhams would like to thank Professor John Seyller for this essay and his attributions.

Notes

¹ A perusal of the series of the Four Vices, the Five Elements, and other series illustrated by Johann Sadeler I (Flemish, 1550-1600) or Maarten de Vos (Flemish, 1532-1603) – two of the Mughals' favorite sources – turned up no matching model. An engraving by Adriaen Collaert after Maarten de Vos of female hermits in landscapes has one image of Margaret of Antioch with a woman reclining in a roughly similar position.

² For the most recent study of Abu'l Hasan's work and career, see Milo C. Beach, 'Aqa Riza and Abu'l Hasan', in M. Beach, E. Fischer, and B.N. Goswamy, eds., Masters of Indian Painting, 1100-1900, 2 vols. (Zurich, 2011), vol. 1: 211-230. For a comprehensive study of Manohar, see John Seyller, 'Manohar', in Beach, Fischer, and Goswamy, eds., 2011, vol. 1: 135-152.

³ Ashmolean Museum EA2978.2597, published in Beach 2011, fig. 8.

⁴ Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, St Petersburg, Ms. E-14, f. 44a, published in Beach 2011, fig. 10; and E. Kostiukovitch, ed., The St. Petersburg Muraqqa': Album of Indian and Persian Miniatures from the 16th through the 18th Century and Specimens of Persian Calligraphy by 'Imad al-Hasani (Milan, 1996), pl. 60.

⁵ Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, St Petersburg, Ms. E-14, f. 46a, published in Kostiukovitch, ed., 1996, pl. 61.

⁶ San Diego Museum of Art 1990.293, published in Seyller 2011, fig. 6.

⁷ See Neptune, lord of the seas, after an engraving by J. Sadler after a 1587 original by the Dutch artist Dirk Barendsz (1534-1592). The signed painting is dated A.H. 1101, a transposed rendering of A.H. 1011/1602-03 C.E., and is published in B.N. Goswamy, Painted Visions: The Goenka Collection of Indian Paintings (New Delhi, 1999), no. 42; and The Holy Family with St John the Baptist and angels, 1600-04, British Museum 2006,0422,0.1, published in Beach 2011, fig. 9.

⁸ See, for example, an ascribed illustration on a detached folio from the 1597-98 Walters Art Museum Khamsa of Amir Khusraw (The Metropolitan Museum of Art 13.228.33), published in John Seyller, Pearls of the Parrot of India: The Walters Art Museum Khamsa of Amir Khusraw of Delhi (Baltimore, 2001), pl. XXVII. An attributed nim qalam scene entitled Holy Family with angels with the same downy skin is published in Sven Gahlin, The Courts of India: Indian Miniatures from the Collection of the Fondation Custodia, Paris (Zwolle, 1991), no. 16, pl. 12. Another work attributed here to Manohar has a similar peri with a feathery body and European-style hair; the work is published in Sotheby's, London, 26 April 1994, lot 2, and is now in a private collection.

⁹ The painting was offered at Sotheby's, London, 6 October 2015, lot 19.

¹⁰ Walters Art Museum W.624, f. 188a, published in Seyller 2001, pl. XXVI.

¹¹ See Milo Cleveland Beach, The Imperial Image: Paintings for the Mughal Court, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C., 2012), pp. 122-140.

¹² A representative example in the Fondation Custodia inv. no 1970-T.37, is published in Gahlin 1991, no. 32, pl. 31.

¹³ For the work of the calligrapher 'Imad al-Hasani, see Oleg Akimushkin, 'The Calligraphy of the St Petersburg Album' in Kostiukovitch, ed., 1996, pp. 40-46.

¹⁴ Akimushkin in Kostiukovitch, ed., 1996, p. 26.

¹⁵ Akimushkin in Kostiukovitch, ed., 1996, p. 27.

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