Friday 19th April - Mughal Miniatures

Mughal painting is a style of south asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from persian miniature painting with hindu, jain and buddhist influences. It developed largely in the court of the Mughal empire between the 16th and 19th centuries, and later spread to other indian courts, both hindu and muslim. This art of painting developed as a blending of persian and indian ideas. 

Mughal painting immediately took a greater interest in realistic portraiture than was typical of persian miniatures. Animals and plants were also more realistically shown. Although many classic works of persian literature continued to be illustrated, as well as Indian works, the taste of the  Mughal emperors for writing diaries, begun by BABUR, provided some of the most lavishly decorated texts. Subjects are rich in variety and include portraits, events and scenes from court life, wild life and hunting scenes and illustrations of battles. 
 

This is a painting from 1589, by a painter called Mirza Farrukh Baig. I love the small tiny detailed sections - they almost look like small mosaic tiles. I think this looks effective as I like detail and would like to incorporate this into my work, but there may be a slight problem - if I am to use this amount of detail it will take a lot of time and there may be a large area to cover, so one solution is to perhaps do this on a larger scale, so more area is being covered. 

Another artist who was a Mughal painter was Daswanth.

    

                       

His work is not as detailed as Baig's, and is slightly more simplistic, but is still effective, but I do prefer Baig's.