Muhammad Shah in a Garden
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Watercolor |
| Current Location: | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (accession no. 14.686) |
| Location History: | Made in northern India around 1735, the painting belonged to the Paris collector Victor Goloubew by 1912, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, bought it in 1914 and still holds it (not on view). |
Muhammad Shah in a Garden is a large painting made with ink, colour and gold on paper. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, dates it to about 1735 and attributes it to Nidha Mal. Small Persian inscriptions on the front identify the emperor and one courtier (MFA Boston n.d.). The painting was made in a revived court studio. Roy explains that Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–48) revived the Mughal painting tradition, which had declined under Aurangzeb, and that the studio flourished under the palace-born artists Kalyan Das, Chitarman and Hunhar, with Nidha Mal among the other notable artists (Roy 2012, pp. 16–23). The Asia Society describes the emperor as a discerning patron who employed master artists such as Nidha Mal and Chitarman (Asia Society n.d.). The Metropolitan Museum adds that Nidha Mal’s paintings are reminiscent of Chitarman’s aesthetic in their cool whites and frieze-like compositions (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2015). The garden setting fits the court’s tastes. Artists of the period often returned to the pleasure garden, which may reflect a wish to escape a violent reality (Asia Society n.d.). That reality included the sack of Delhi: many artists left for Faizabad and Lucknow after Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1739 (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2015). Read together, these sources suggest the painting shows the emperor in an idealised retreat at a time of political decline.