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

Posthumous portrait of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748) holding a falcon (recto) (1764) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Muhammad Rizavi Hindi (Indian, active mid-1700s).

The work and its context

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

The artist used the carpet, the floor cushion, and the halo to indicate the royal status of the seated figure. He has turned the picture plane into the space of a window, over the sill of which a golden carpet ornamented with a field of lilies marks his location for outsiders. His signature in Persian, the Mughal lingua franca, interrupts the fringed border. Painted after the emperor’s death and the dissolution of much of the Mughal court, this refined portrait pays tribute to the wealth and power of the imperial past.

Object facts

• Title: Posthumous portrait of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748) holding a falcon (recto)
• Date: 1764
• Creator attribution: Muhammad Rizavi Hindi (Indian, active mid-1700s)
• 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

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.
• Quintanilla, Sonya Rhie. “Art and Stories: Dazzling paintings and luxurious objects tell tales from Mughal India.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 4 (July/August 2016): 5–7.

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.