Sayandeep Pan

This small portrait is a great window into how art worked at Awadh's court during a period of dramatic cultural mixing. A few things make it significant. The Anglo-Mughal fusion it represents: the portrait shows Shuja ud-Daula in three-quarter face, based on an oil painting…

Here's my own reading of it, for what it's worth. I think the painting isn't really trying to document a person at all — it's staging an argument about what kingship *is*. Everything in the composition works to dissolve the particular into the exemplary. The…