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拍品专文
In this example of excellent draughtsmanship, a woman is leaning back on an Indian bolster pillow, in an absorptive state, contemplating the contents of the book in front of her and another one in her left hand. Perhaps she is writing in the former, using the pen in the large and elegantly tinted blue-and-white ink-well.
While the problems of identifying the women portrayed by Mughal artists are numerous (Linda York Leach, Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings, Cleveland, 1986, pp.134-6), Mughal variations of studies of women based on European paintings and engravings normally followed two types: the Virgin and Child and the allegorical figure in the opening of Plantin’s Polyglot Bible presented to Akbar by the Jesuit priests in 1580 (J. P. Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, London, 2012, p.124; for more on this, see the introduction on European subjects in Mughal paintings before lot 14). However, even though our drawing is set in a secular setting, the posture and absorptive expression of the woman suggests a religious theme that the artist drew from.
A remarkably similar woman is depicted in Virgin and Child Attended by Angels, attributed to Manohar, circa 1600, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015.785). Although less melancholic in her expression, her posture, face, apart from her nose, figure, and folds are almost identical to ours, while details such as her book, the blue-and-white porcelain and bench decoration are also comparable. Unless one attributes our painting to Manohar as well, one might imagine the two artists drawing on the same European engraving, as was common among the best Mughal painters.
A single portrait of the Madonna in the Harvard Art Museums (inv.no.2009.202.78) also attributed to Manohar shows similar features, and two other contemporaneous, but secular variations of these absorptive Madonnas are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (14.688), with a related double verse, recently sold at Boisgirard – Antonini, Paris, 17 December 2025, lot 261.
Mughal paintings drawing on European examples would serve as inspiration themselves for later works (Linda York Leach, op.cit., p.51). Some of the earliest of women are two small paintings in the Mughal style dated 1600-5 and attributed to Keshav Das in the British Library (Johnson Album 22,11a-b; in Losty and Roy, op.cit., fig. 74, upper left and right). J. P. Losty and Malini Roy stress how revolutionary portraitures of lower rank Mughal women would have been at the time, “as if the artist had produced an acceptable Occidentalist fantasy type of lady and then decided to expand the format” (Losty and Roy, op.cit., p. 124), on the basis of works such as ours. Other contemporaneous and later single portraits of women follow traditional Indian modes of composition (see for example Linda York Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings From the Chester Beatty Library, Volume I, London, 1995, cat. 2.208; Linda York Leach, Paintings from India, Oxford, 1998, cat. 22; Michael Brand and Glenn D. Lowry, Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory, New York, 1985, cat.50-1).
While the problems of identifying the women portrayed by Mughal artists are numerous (Linda York Leach, Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings, Cleveland, 1986, pp.134-6), Mughal variations of studies of women based on European paintings and engravings normally followed two types: the Virgin and Child and the allegorical figure in the opening of Plantin’s Polyglot Bible presented to Akbar by the Jesuit priests in 1580 (J. P. Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, London, 2012, p.124; for more on this, see the introduction on European subjects in Mughal paintings before lot 14). However, even though our drawing is set in a secular setting, the posture and absorptive expression of the woman suggests a religious theme that the artist drew from.
A remarkably similar woman is depicted in Virgin and Child Attended by Angels, attributed to Manohar, circa 1600, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015.785). Although less melancholic in her expression, her posture, face, apart from her nose, figure, and folds are almost identical to ours, while details such as her book, the blue-and-white porcelain and bench decoration are also comparable. Unless one attributes our painting to Manohar as well, one might imagine the two artists drawing on the same European engraving, as was common among the best Mughal painters.
A single portrait of the Madonna in the Harvard Art Museums (inv.no.2009.202.78) also attributed to Manohar shows similar features, and two other contemporaneous, but secular variations of these absorptive Madonnas are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (14.688), with a related double verse, recently sold at Boisgirard – Antonini, Paris, 17 December 2025, lot 261.
Mughal paintings drawing on European examples would serve as inspiration themselves for later works (Linda York Leach, op.cit., p.51). Some of the earliest of women are two small paintings in the Mughal style dated 1600-5 and attributed to Keshav Das in the British Library (Johnson Album 22,11a-b; in Losty and Roy, op.cit., fig. 74, upper left and right). J. P. Losty and Malini Roy stress how revolutionary portraitures of lower rank Mughal women would have been at the time, “as if the artist had produced an acceptable Occidentalist fantasy type of lady and then decided to expand the format” (Losty and Roy, op.cit., p. 124), on the basis of works such as ours. Other contemporaneous and later single portraits of women follow traditional Indian modes of composition (see for example Linda York Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings From the Chester Beatty Library, Volume I, London, 1995, cat. 2.208; Linda York Leach, Paintings from India, Oxford, 1998, cat. 22; Michael Brand and Glenn D. Lowry, Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory, New York, 1985, cat.50-1).