Sa'di in the Rose Garden

The whole title of the painting is Sa’di meets a Friend in a Garden (or Sa’di in the Rose Garden or a folio from a Gulistan), painted by a Mughal court artist Govardhan in 1644 or 1645. The subject of the painting is taken from the Gulistan (The Rose Garden), a monumental work of Persian poetry. It was written by the 13th-century poet Sa’di. This particular illustration captures the poem’s most crucial and programmatic scene. Here, the poet (on the right) in a striped robe and a traditional skullcap talks to his companion, who is picking a large array of colorful blossoms in his tucked-up green tunic. The Mughal master Govardhan depicts the familiar two-dimensional spatial layout typical of the Timurid period in the Mughal court painting tradition. Yet, he adds in it a modern feel. There is a sense of delicate psychological realism in addition to European pictorial conventions brought by the Mughal court artists. Added to the scene is the author’s own facial modeling that gives the poet’s features a certain distinct individuality. Set under a white blossoming tree and a leafy green tree, the two interlocutors look at each other, suggesting the genesis of the Gulistan – a garden of transitory floral beauty transformed into a perennial bouquet of axioms, verses, and prose narratives. A manuscript copy of this poem painted by the legendary calligrapher Sultan Ali Mashhadi of Herat in 1468 was water-damaged during the generations’ worth of storage. It was then beautifully repainted by Govardhan at the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s court. Today, this masterpiece of Persian literature, draped in the best Indian artistic traditions, is stored in the public domain in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art. The Mughal court artist Govardhan has rendered it in an amazing degree of botanical accuracy. The white blossoming tree and the leafy green tree have been depicted in full blossom and full leaves respectively.