An attempt on the life of the Mughal emperor Akbar

Madhav was one of the skilled Hindu painters working in Emperor Akbar’s busy royal workshop in the late 1500s. Like many artists there, he didn’t always handle an entire painting alone. The atelier ran on teamwork, with different people taking on the outline, the colouring, or the faces. Madhav often got the job of painting the portraits, the careful, expressive faces that brought the figures to life. His name shows up on several pages of the Akbarnama, the official history of Akbar’s reign, usually noted as the one responsible for the “chehreh” or faces. This folio from the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum is a solid example of how that system worked among court painters. The illustration depicts an event of an assassination attempt on Akbar in Delhi, where an arrow struck him in the shoulder as he was returning from an outing. Akbar is shown mounted on a white horse, holding the arrow absolutely unshaken while his men run down the attackers in the background. In the lower left, one of the assailants is already being killed. The composition is busy and a lot happening at once yet it doesn’t feel cluttered. According to the small red note written beneath the image at the time, Jagan designed the composition, Bhawani the Elder did the main painting and colouring, and Madhav finished the faces. That division of labour was typical in Akbar’s studio and helped the artists produce the long series of lively narrative pictures that fill the Akbarnama. The manuscript was made for the emperor himself and later stayed in the libraries of his son and grandson before ending up in the V&A. Looking at the painting today, you can still sense the energy of that workshop and the quiet skill Madhav brought to the human faces that hold the story together.