Portrait of a kneeling holy man, from the Prince Salim Album (c. 1556–60; border c. 1602): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a kneeling holy man, from the Prince Salim Album (c. 1556–60; border c. 1602) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Mir Sayyid Ali (Persian, active in Iran 1540s–50, active in India 1555–1580).

The work and its context

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

The kneeling figure is a charlatan holy man who wears the blue robe of a Sufi mystic. According to the inscriptions above and below the painting, he acts humble and pious for monetary gain rather than sincerity of devotion. Images of charlatan holy men recur in Mughal painting, including in the Cleveland Tuti-Nama. Mir Sayyid Ali was the first head of the Mughal workshop under Akbar. He was responsible for training Indian artists to adopt Persian sensibilities, admired by elites of the Islamic world during the 1400s to at least the 1700s.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a kneeling holy man, from the Prince Salim Album
• Date: c. 1556–60; border c. 1602
• Creator attribution: Mir Sayyid Ali (Persian, active in Iran 1540s–50, active in India 1555–1580)
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper, laid down on an album page with cream borders decorated with gold flowers and geometric motifs
• Dimensions: Painting: 12 x 7.1 cm (4 3/4 x 2 13/16 in.); Overall: 23.3 x 14.9 cm (9 3/16 x 5 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.295

A detail from the museum

In this sensitive portrayal of a charlatan holy man, the eyes are pale and empty.

Collection credit

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Mace, Sonya Rhie, Mohsen Ashtiany, Catherine Glynn, Pedro Moura Carvalho, Marcus Fraser, and Ruby Lal. Mughal Paintings: Art and Stories: the Cleveland Museum of Art. London: D Giles Limited, 2016.

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.