Portrait Jewel of Emperor Jahangir (early 1600s): Art, History and Details

Portrait Jewel of Emperor Jahangir (early 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The fourth Mughal emperor of India, Jahangir, had tiny portraits of himself made to give as gifts to his friends, family, and nobles of the court as a sign of royal favor. These portraits were mounted and worn as jewels or turban ornaments. The carpet or textile under his hands references the covered rail of a balcony where the emperor addressed the public three times a day to hear complaints or petitions.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait Jewel of Emperor Jahangir
• Date: early 1600s
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Jahangir (reigned 1605–27)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 4.8 x 3.2 cm (1 7/8 x 1 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1944.496

A detail from the museum

The pearl earring denotes Jahangir’s affiliation with an order of Sufi mystics.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Islamic Art; Selected Examples from the Loan Exhibition of Islamic Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1944.
• Rice, Yael and Sonja Drimmer. "How Scientists Use and Abuse Portraiture" Hyperallergic, December 11, 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/604897/how-scientists-use-and-abuse-portraiture/
• Rice, Yael. The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.