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International Art Treasures Web Magazine June 2005 |
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Internationally Touring Exhibition of South Asian Paintings Features Important
Early Mughal Painting:
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With more than 1,400 examples, the San Diego Museum of Art’s Edwin Binney 3rd Collection is renowned worldwide as one of the largest and most important concentrations of South Asian painting outside of India. Opening in San Diego on October 22, 2005, Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting will be the first internationally touring exhibition to fully survey the richness and depth of this collection, providing a complete overview of the history of Indian painting with rare and significant examples. |
Among the exhibition’s 125 featured works is the delightful The Jackal Who Pronounced Himself King. It belongs to an illustrated book of Persian tales, the Tutinama (The Tales of the Parrot), which is one of the first, and possibly the very first, undertakings of the fledgling Mughal atelier under Akbar (reigned 1556–1605). The young emperor had an almost insatiable appetite for wondrous stories. This particular series is an adaptation of a Sanskrit collection of tales, each related nightly by a pet parrot in order to detain his mistress and prevent her from leaving her husband’s house to commit adultery. The bird would spin marvelous yarns, such as the one about a very ordinary jackal who accidentally fell into a vat of indigo while nosing around a dye shop. Harnessing the full potential of his strange new blue appearance, the jackal manages to convince the other animals that he is a wondrous, divine creature come to rule the animal kingdom, and he proclaims himself king. He is depicted here as newly enthroned and surrounded by his court. For safety’s sake, he keeps his relatives and the non-threatening, mild-mannered animals close by, while relegating the more dangerous and powerful beasts to the edges of the assembly.
The uneasy tension of the situation is conveyed in the slightly precarious rendition of the throne and especially in the facial expressions of the creatures. The cheetahs, the lions, and the tigers appear confounded and nervously submissive, looking at one another, tails and paws raised in silent protest. Even the elephant’s expression and demeanor convey an alert consternation at the topsy-turvy arrangement.
Shortly hereafter, the true ordinary nature of the blue jackal is betrayed by his own relatives, and he is quickly deposed and put in his proper place.
The Tutinama was painted by a motley group of about one hundred Indian artists, all of whom had been working either in the traditional indigenous styles of devotional manuscript illumination or in the Indo-Persian hybrid styles of the Sultanate productions. These Indian painters were instructed by and worked together with the Iranian artists recently brought to Delhi by Akbar’s father Humayun. The works from Tutinama show remarkable assimilation of Persianate styles combined with a completely new sense of naturalism, volume, and spatial depth which accords with the taste of their patron, the young emperor Akbar.
Image Credits:
Title: The Jackal Who Pronounced Himself King.
Folio detached from the “Cleveland” Tutinama ms.
Medium: Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
Mughal, Akbar period; ca. 1560–65
Dimensions: 4 27/32 x 3 31/32 in. (12.3 x 10.1 cm)
Edwin Binney 3rd Collection 1990:273
Image Courtesy: The San Diego Museum of Art