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Posthumous portrait of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748) holding a falcon (recto)

Muhammad Rizavi Hindi

1764

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Mughal Painting Romanticism 18th Century Portrait Lucknow

Dominant colour

Posthumous portrait of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748) holding a falcon (recto) is a 1764 unspecified by Muhammad Rizavi Hindi, a Mughal Painting work, depicting Lucknow, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Muhammad Rizavi Hindi
When & what style?: 1764 · Mughal Painting
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a man in a white robe sitting on the floor, holding a falcon on his wrist. A golden halo glows behind his head, and a fancy carpet with lilies spreads beneath him. This painting was made after the emperor died, when his court was already falling apart. The artist used small details—a halo, a carpet, a cushion—to show the man’s royal status, even though he was no longer alive. The signature in Persian peeks out from the carpet’s fringe. To see more work like this, look up mughal india, probably uttar pradesh, lucknow, indian art.

The story of this work

Overview

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.