AN ILLUSTRATION DEPICTING A YOUTHFUL MUGHAL PRINCE RECEIVING A MESSAGE, WITHIN THE BORDERS OF A FARHANG-I-JAHANGIRI FOLIO, INDIA, IMPERIAL MUGHAL, CIRCA 1604 |

gouache heightened with gold on paper, nine lines of text in nasta'liq script above the painting, laid down on an album page with outer borders decorated with large scrolling zoomorphic vines and chinoiserie cloud bands 

Sotheby's New York, 17 March 2015, lot 1184.
Ex-Collection Dr. Claus Virch (d.2012), former curator of European Old Master paintings and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In good condition, some scuffing to the lower left edge of the folio border, slight wear and slight staining to the surface of the image with a tiny tear to the paper on the middle right edge, now repaired, as viewed.
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This highly important and rare Imperial Mughal painting from the late Akbar period is very possibly an unrecorded illustrated miniature from the 'Chester Beatty Akbarnama' of 1604. Pictured here is a Mughal prince resembling a youthful Akbar painted in the lightly colored nim-qalam (half painted) manner as employed in a number of leaves of the Chester Beatty Akbarnama. Although the present painting does not contain a confirming inscription it very closely matches other paintings from that series in subject, approximate size, stances of figures, overall composition, depiction of the rocky background and Imperial atelier quality - and was very likely executed in the same period by the same royal workshop that produced the known leaves of the Beatty Akbarnama, the majority of whose extant folios being in the British Library (MS. OR.1362) including seventeen miniatures, with a further six known in the collection of the Chester Beatty Library. Some scholars have also noted a number of missing Beatty Akbarnama folios in the sequence, of which the present painting may be one, although this may not be provable here without a corroborating inscription.   

The illustration has been slightly trimmed and remounted within the borders of the Farhang-i-Jahangiri lexicon, most likely by the Parisian dealer Georges Demotte in the 1920s, as were numerous other known leaves from the series. The panel of nine lines of black and red ink nasta’liq script above the miniature being likely from the lexicon. Two slender vertical side panels have been fitted in left and right of the miniature to enable the full use of the lapis blue and gold flowered inner borders of the lexicon, as well as its full outer borders. 

For the British Library folios see J.P. Losty and Roy, Mughal India Art, Culture and Empire, London, 2012 pp.70-72, figs.32-33, and N. M. Titley, Miniatures from Persian Manuscripts, London, 1977, p.69, no.207. For Chester Beatty Library folios see Linda York Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, 1995, vol.1, pp.310-320.