A Mughal Emperor (possibly Bahadur Shah I) being entertained at court

‘A Mughal Emperor (possibly Bahadur Shah I) being entertained at court’, by the artist Chitarman II (Kalyan Das, active ca. 1680 to 1750), dated circa 1710 to 1720. It’s catalogued as a gouache heightened with gold on paper. It is painted piece of about seven and three quarter by seven inches set within a buff leaf of about fourteen and a half by ten inches. As of now it's held in an undisclosed private collection after its sale at Sotheby’s in London in April 2024 for 69,850 GBP. The recorded history around this piece begins only in 1980 with a London dealer and passes then to a private family collection, so everything before that date stays largely unknown. There exists a certain hesitation around the identity of the seated figure, possibly the emperor Bahadur Shah I, who ruled from 1707 to 1712. The stated date range runs well past his reign and into those of his successors, which means the face and the year cannot be made to agree with certainty. What the sheet does announce with confidence is a world of settled ceremony. The following scene is arranged with a subtle architectural calm. A monarch shown in a green coat strung with pearls, sitting upon a gilded throne beneath a vast red roof. There is also a green halo pressed behind his orange and gold turban. His hands are open, lifted in a gesture of attention rather than command. Beside him a young attendant in white stands at ease while bearded nobles in soft greens and ochres have gathered along the left edge holding staffs. On the right side, three women can be seen in saffron and gold, kneeling upon the carpet within a few feet of the throne. One of them is holding a small fruit, while a dense bank of turbaned courtiers looks on above a group of kneeling musicians who cradle round bodied lutes and a striped barrel drum. Behind them a white pavilion with a single fluted pillar carries a grey wall scattered with golden flowering plants, and beyond its edge a cypress and heavy foliage lean into a sky of burning orange. The foreground is left almost entirely empty. That broad pale courtyard separates the throne from the musicians like a held breath and gives the figures a stage on which nothing yet moves. The materials explain the quality of that stillness. Opaque water based pigment bound in gum was laid over a burnished paper until the surface became smooth and slightly reflective, and gold was then applied in the carpet and the throne and the floral wall and the jewellery so that the brightest passages seem to generate their own light. The red roof is a single flat plane of colour with a faint grain of brushwork and the courtiers’ faces are modelled with a patient softness that lets each one carry a distinct expression within a tightly packed group. This is the late Mughal manner in its refined form, in which portraiture and pageantry are fused and the individual likeness is never allowed to break the order of the whole. Persian verses in black nastaliq script run above and below the picture and further verses appear on the reverse. No translation of them has been located for this study, so the exact poem and its relation to the scene remain undetermined. The painter belonged to a generation that inherited an imperial workshop still valued and yet no longer secure. After the long reign of Aurangzeb the court passed rapidly through short and contested reigns and painters worked under the pressure of unstable patronage while keeping alive the techniques of portraiture and courtly genre that earlier emperors had made famous. Chitarman is recorded as serving across several of these reigns and his name later became attached to the renewed splendour of the Delhi atelier under Muhammad Shah. A court scene with a theme around music and art would have answered a real political need in those years. A ruler who could be at ease amid poets and singers, was a ruler whose house was still orderly, cultured and whose authority was still gracious rather than anxious. This reading draws the sheet toward a much larger meaning. In the contemporary Indo-Persian understanding of kingship at the time, the sovereign was expected to be a listener and an avid connoisseur of art just as much as a warrior. Hence, the gathering of voices and strings around the throne becomes a picture of balance in which sound is arranged around a still centre. The halo suggests a radiant persona bestowed upon the ruler as his divine right to rule rather than power seized by him, while the open hands imply receptivity before beauty. Poetry and music in this culture were also thought to carry the soul toward something beyond the court, and the emptiness of the courtyard may be read as the space into which that sound would travel. The painting therefore offers neither narrative nor event. It holds a moment of attention in suspension and proposes that the true ornament of power is the capacity to be moved.