Mughal royal portraits: how the emperors and their courts were painted

This page looks closely at one kind of Mughal painting: the royal portrait. It explains the pose the emperors were painted in, the signs that told a viewer "this is a king", how one portrait was reused in other pictures, and why some faces were painted over years later. For the wider story of the Mughal workshops and their animal studies, read what is Mughal painting. For how the Mughal court fits among India's other royal courts, start at the Indian court painting guide.

How portrait painting grew at the Mughal court

The Mughal emperors cared about faces from the start. India's National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) says Babur, the first Mughal emperor, had a keen eye for portraits and wrote about painters in his memoirs. He wrote about the Persian master Bihzad of Herat in detail. Babur said that Bihzad's work was dainty and that he drew bearded faces admirably, but that he did not draw other faces well and greatly lengthened the double chin.

Under Babur's son Humayun, the court produced Princes of the House of Timur, painted between 1545 and 1550 in opaque watercolour on cotton. NCERT says it is probably by the Persian artist Abd us Samad and shows members of the family outdoors among trees and blossoms. Later artists painted new faces over the old ones, so that Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan all appear in a picture begun during Humayun's reign.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London says the practice of taking likenesses of people at court began under Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, and reached new levels of accuracy under his son Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627. The sections below look at what those likenesses had in common.

The standard pose: one figure, in profile, on green

Most single Mughal portraits follow the same plan. One person stands with the face in strict profile, which means a pure side view with only one eye visible. The background is a plain field of colour, most often green.

The V&A describes a portrait of the emperor Aurangzeb shown full length, in profile, against a plain pale green background. The museum says this continued a tradition in Mughal portraits that had begun in the late 16th century. Manohar's portrait of the courtier Mirza Ghazi, painted early in Jahangir's reign, uses the same pale green ground. Abu'l Hasan's portrait of the young Shah Jahan, from the 1610s, puts the prince in strict profile against a deep green background filled with flowering plants.

The profile has a practical side. A side view shows the shape of the nose, the lips, the beard and the turban clearly. That made each courtier easy to recognise, which mattered because these portraits were records of real people.

The signs that marked a ruler

A viewer in the 1600s could tell an emperor from a courtier at a glance, even in a crowded scene. Painters used a small set of signs.

The halo

The V&A says the halo characterised imperial figures from the reign of Jahangir. A second V&A record, for a drawing of Raja Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur made between 1640 and 1650, explains where the idea came from. It says the halo of rays of light was borrowed from Mughal artists, who had taken it from Western art, and that the same sign had appeared much earlier in Buddhist paintings in India. The Jodhpur drawing shows how quickly the halo spread from the Mughal court to the Rajput courts. Our page on Rajput court portraits follows it there.

The parasol

The V&A calls the parasol one of the main emblems of royalty. Shah Jahan was painted on horseback with a parasol held over his head by his son. Two centuries later, painters in the Punjab still used the parasol to mark Maharaja Ranjit Singh as king, as our page on Sikh court painting shows.

Jewels and titles

Shah Jahan loved jewels and knew a great deal about them, according to the V&A, and he was often painted holding them. In Abu'l Hasan's portrait, the prince holds up a turban ornament. The title "Shah Jahan", meaning "King of the World", is written above his head in gold. NCERT adds that portraits of Shah Jahan carried grand titles and that his painters preferred an ideal, polished image over a plain record.

Pictures with a message

Some royal portraits carried a political message through symbols. NCERT describes Jahangir's Dream, painted by Abu'l Hasan between 1618 and 1622. The emperor had dreamed that Shah Abbas of Persia, his rival, visited him. In the painting, the two kings embrace while standing on a globe. Jahangir stands on a lion and the Persian Shah on a sheep. Two winged angels hold a golden halo of the sun and the moon behind them. NCERT says these images came from European art that had reached the court.

In Jahangir Enthroned on an Hourglass, painted by Bichitra in 1625, the emperor sits on an hourglass and hands a book to Shaikh Husain of the Chishti shrine. NCERT says the painting includes figures who resemble the Ottoman Sultan and King James I of England, and the painter himself, holding a painting as an offering.

European ideas also show in Bichitr's portrait of Asaf Khan, the father-in-law of Shah Jahan, dated to the third year of Shah Jahan's reign (1630 to 1631). The V&A points to the putti (small winged children from European art) hovering in the sky and to the use of perspective, and calls the painting an example of how fully European conventions had been absorbed into Mughal art.

Writing on the picture

Mughal portraits often name the sitter, the artist, or both. The portrait of Mirza Ghazi is inscribed in Persian "Likeness of Mirza Ghazi, son of Mirza Jani, the work of Manohar". The V&A says Mirza Ghazi led Mughal armies for Jahangir and wrote Persian verse that the emperor admired.

Emperors sometimes added their own words. Years after Abu'l Hasan painted him, Shah Jahan wrote in the border that it was "a good likeness of me in my twenty-fifth year" and the fine work of Nadir al-Zaman, the title given to Abu'l Hasan. In large court scenes, tiny Persian labels name the courtiers. NCERT says that in Jahangir in Darbar, painted in 1620, the courtiers stand in order of rank, and even a Jesuit priest, Father Corsi, has his name written beside him.

One face, many pictures

Court artists reused portraits. The V&A explains that single portraits served as templates for scenes of the court. Manohar's portrait of Mirza Ghazi was copied at exactly the same size into Manohar's painting of Jahangir in a garden, where the emperor, in strict profile, greets his son Prince Parviz. The V&A counts 11 courtiers to Jahangir's right and 4 to his left in that scene. Because each person was traced from a separate study, the figures are not all drawn to the same scale.

The artists sometimes painted themselves in. In a scene painted between 1615 and 1618 showing the ruler of Mewar submitting to Prince Khurram (the future Shah Jahan), the artist Nanha included himself kneeling at the side, sketching the Rana's portrait. The V&A dates the event to February 1615.

These studies were drawn and coloured in stages, with a team of specialists. Our page on how Indian miniature paintings were made explains the steps from drawing to burnishing.

Portraits that were changed later

A portrait could be edited when a new emperor wanted a different story. The V&A says Shah Jahan seems to have tried to erase the record of his father. In one painting, Akbar hands the imperial crown straight to Shah Jahan and leaves Jahangir out. In another painting by Manohar, the artist Murar painted Shah Jahan's head over Jahangir's, and replaced the young Shah Jahan with his own son, Dara Shikoh. Murar signed his work in tiny writing behind the new emperor.

Albums: where the portraits lived

The portraits were kept in books and albums. NCERT says that under Jahangir, single paintings were mounted in albums, called muraqqa, with margins decorated in gold. The V&A describes borders of gold flowering plants painted on indigo-dyed paper, and says Shah Jahan combined his father's paintings with new ones in new albums, pasting calligraphy on the back of each page.

Many of these pages were later separated. A group sold at auction in London in 1925, known as the Minto Album, was divided between the V&A and the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. It includes the young Shah Jahan, Asaf Khan and the garden scene with Mirza Ghazi.

What this means for a Mughal Emperor portrait of your pet

The Mughal Emperor style on Purrealism takes its name from these rulers. In the gallery, the Mughal Emperor portrait shows a grey cat wearing a jewelled crown and pearls. The studio examples also include a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and a Siamese cat in the same style.

If the profile tradition appeals to you, look through your photos for one that shows your pet's face clearly, with the eyes, nose and markings in focus. The portrait studio takes one photo of up to 5 MB. If you are still deciding between the nine Indian styles, the style finder further down this page asks a few questions about your pet and suggests one, and our page on animals in Indian court painting shows how these same artists painted dogs, cats and horses.