Posthumous portrait of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748) holding a falcon (recto); Calligraphy (verso) (1764): Art, History and Details

Posthumous portrait of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748) holding a falcon (recto); Calligraphy (verso) (1764) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Muhammad Rizavi Hindi (Indian, active mid-1700s); Mahmud ibn Ishaq al-Shahabi (Persian, active mid- to late 1500s).

The work and its context

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

Emperor Muhammad Shah, who reigned from 1719 to 1748, was known as “Rangila,” which means “the Colorful.” The innovative use of a black background sharply sets off the chartreuse green of his jama and the pearls of his adornments and bolster. On his left thumb he wears an archer’s ring, and a stabbing dagger is tucked into his bejeweled belt. Even his trained hunting falcon has a ruby necklace. In this formal posthumous portrait, the master artist conveys a heightened realism that emerges effortlessly from elegant contour lines and bold use of color. The work was part of an album of paintings collected in India before 1811 by a Scottish politician who worked for the British East India Company.

Object facts

• Title: Posthumous portrait of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748) holding a falcon (recto); Calligraphy (verso)
• Date: 1764
• Creator attribution: Muhammad Rizavi Hindi (Indian, active mid-1700s); Mahmud ibn Ishaq al-Shahabi (Persian, active mid- to late 1500s)
• Culture: Mughal India, probably Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Painting only: 14.4 x 10.3 cm (5 11/16 x 4 1/16 in.); Page: 28 x 23.8 cm (11 x 9 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.347

A detail from the museum

The archer’s thumb ring is for drawing the bowstring. Perhaps he was left-handed.

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

• Indian Miniature Paintings from West Coast Private Collections. [Exhibition] May 29-July 19, 1964. San Francisco, CA: M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 1964.
• Desai, Vishakha N., B. N. Goswamy, and Ainslie Thomas Embree. Life at Court: Art for India's Rulers, 16th-19th Centuries. Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1985.
• 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.