- Title
- Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) Visiting the Ascetic Jadrup (recto), Calligraphy (verso)
- Culture
- Mughal
- Date Made
- circa 1750-1775
- Medium
- Opaque watercolor, gold, and ink on paper
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 11 1/4 x 10 1/2 in. (28.58 x 26.67 cm); Image: 6 5/8 x 5 7/8 in. (16.83 x 14.92 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.87.20.2
- Collecting Area
- South and Southeast Asian Art
- Curatorial Notes
In the 18th and 19th centuries it was a common practice to make copies of great paintings from the golden era of the Mughals in the 17th century. This folio is a partial copy of one of the dispersed illustrations from the Jahangirnama (Memoirs of Jahangir) that is now in the Musée Guimet, Paris (7171). The original painting, attributed to circa 1616-1620 by the master artist Govardhan (active circa 1596-1645), shows a vignette similar in composition to the LACMA work in its top half, while the bottom half has a crowded scene of the retinue of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-1627). The horse and groom in the original’s bottom half have been updated stylistically and incorporated in the copy’s top half behind Jahangir, and the distant cityscape in the original has been transformed to a distant village scene with an ascetic’s hermitage and a rider being given water from a well. The depictions of Jahangir and the ascetic Jadrup in the two works are clearly a model-and-copy, with only minor variations in detail and style.
Jadrup was a respected Hindu religious hermit who lived in a cave outside of Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, and later moved to near Mathura, Uttar Pradesh. He was sixty years of age when first visited by Jahangir in 1617 and had previously been consulted by Jahangir’s father, Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605). In his memoirs Jahangir relates his awe of Jadrup’s cave dwelling, austere existence, and spiritual knowledge.
- Selected Bibliography
- Schmitz, Barbara, ed. After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Mumbai, India: Marg Publications, 2002.
