must come to feel that he cannot bestow individuality upon his work, and is thus forced to think of God, the giver of life, and will thus increase in knowledge.'
A large number of exquisite miniatures, or paintings on paper designed to illustrate manuscripts, or to form royal portrait-albums, have come down to us from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which fully bear out Bernier's praise. The technique and detail are admirable, and the colouring and lights often astonishingly skilful. They include portraits of the emperors, princes, and chief nobles, which, in spite of Bernier's criticism, display unusual power in the delineation of individual countenances; and there are landscapes which are happily conceived and brilliantly executed[1]. There is no doubt that the Jesuit missions at Agra and other cities of Hindústán brought western ideas bear upon the development of Indian painting. Jahángír, who was, by his own account, 'very fond of pictures and an excellent judge of them,' is recorded to have had a picture of the Madonna behind
- ↑ Mr. Archibald Constable has brought two of these interesting relics of a little-known art within the reach of all by reproducing them with marked success in his Oriental Miscellany, where the frontispiece to Bernier's Travels is a fine portrait of Sháh-Jahán, and a landscape of Akbar hunting by night illustrates Somervile's Chace, appended to Dryden's Aureng-Zebe. Both are after originals in Colonel H. B. Hanna's collection. The portrait of Aurangzíb prefixed to this volume is after a drawing by an Indian artist, contained in an album in the British Museum (Add. 18,801, no. 34), which bears the seal of Ashraf Khán and the date A. H. 1072 (1661, 2). It represents Aurangzíb at about the time of his accession, or perhaps somewhat earlier, and belongs to the rarest and finest class of Indian portraits.
