Miskin was a renowned Mughal court painter active roughly between 1560 and 1604. He worked in the imperial atelier of Akbar, specialising in naturalistic depictions of animals and human figures while contributing designs to the great illustrated manuscripts of the reign. He had emerged as one of its principal compositional artists by the production of the Akbarnama, and his command of animal design was evident in works such as Bullocks Dragging Siege-Guns up a Hill. He was one of the atelier's working backbones, a designer whose compositions other painters were assigned to fill in and paint. And it was his particular feel for movement and anatomy that pushed the artworks depicting animal scenes toward the kind of naturalism Akbar's court had come to document.