The Poet and the Prince (recto); Calligraphy (verso)
Sheet: 16 5/8 x 10 1/2 inches (42.23 x 26.67 cm)
Framed: 26 7/8 x 20 3/4 x 1 3/8 inches (68.25 x 52.71 x 3.51 cm)
Miniature Painting of India, Pomona College Art Gallery, February 15–March 6, 1957, no cat.
The Grand Mughals: Imperial Painting in India 1600-1660, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, September 25-November 5, 1978; Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland, November 20, 1978-January 5, 1979; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 2-March 25, 1979; Asia House Gallery, New York, April 19-June 10, 1979, no. 7 as A Young Prince with an Old Man and an Attendance [recto]; Calligraphy [verso].
Genre, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 5–May 15, 1983, no. 53 as Planting of Trees Before a Prince (detail).
Echoes: Islamic Art and Contemporary Artists, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, August 31, 2013-April 27, 2014, no cat.
This album page was created for Emperor Jahangir and depicts a young Mughal prince and his attendant, identifiable by their turbans and attire. They stand in the presence of a Persian Sufi poet or scholar, who wears a different style of turban and a distinguished chola (overcoat). The scene is set outdoors next to a babbling brook and beneath a flowering tree where the group, with open books in hand, engage in lively conversation. The accurately rendered figures and natural setting are typical of the high degree of skill of Mughal court artists at the end of the 16th century.
Calligraphy was considered the highest art form in historical Islamic cultures. Master calligraphers were like famous artists today; they were well known, they signed their works and art connoisseurs like Emperor Jahangir could recognize the work of a specific calligrapher from his writing style. Examples of calligraphy were collected and preserved in albums and were frequently mounted with painted and illuminated borders. This folio from Jahangir’s Gulshan Album demonstrates the format of Imperial Mughal albums, which displayed paintings and calligraphy on reverse pages.
With Paul Mallon (1884-1975), Paris and New York, by 1948;
Purchased from Paul Mallon by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1948.
“Masterpiece of the Month,” in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts Gallery News 14, no. 3 (January 1949).
Milo Cleveland Beach, The Grand Mughals: Imperial Painting in India 1600-1660, exh. cat. (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1978), 49-51, (repro.).
Suzanne Marshall, “The Poet and the Prince—A Moghul Painting from the Album of an Imperial Connoisseur” in The Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum Bulletin 5 (November 1978): 7-25 (repro.).
Rekha Morris, “Some Additions to the Known Corpus of Paintings by the Mughal Artist Farrukh Chela” in Ars Orientalis 13 (June 1983): 135-151, (repro.).
Ellen R. Goheen, The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 222-223, (repro.).
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 77, 388 (repro.).
Elizabeth B. Moynihan, “Reflections of Paradise” in The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj Mahal (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 24-25, (repro.).
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 274 (repro.).
Hamama Tul Bushra, Gulshan Muraqqa’: An Imperial Discretion (Kansas City: University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2015), (repro.).
