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Akbar
La'l - Enlarge image
Akbar
- Object:
Painting
- Place of origin:
Mughal Empire (made)
- Date:
ca. 1590-95 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
La'l (maker)
Sanwala (maker) - Materials and Techniques:
Painted in opaque watercolour and gold on paper
- Museum number:
IS.2:92-1896
- Gallery location:
In Storage
This painting by the Mughal court artists La’l and Sanwala depicts the Mughal emperor Akbar (r.1556–1605) hunting for black buck using his trained cheetahs. It is an illustration to the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of his reign. Here, Akbar restrains the horse he would have chosen to ride in order to be able to follow the hunt swiftly. The cheetah has been released from the empty bullock cart in the foreground and now brings down a fully grown male blackbuck. A second cheetah is still blindfolded and held by its keeper in the upper right of the composition. Eight females are included in the painting, with two other cheetahs identified by the naturalist Divyabhanusinh as 'sub-adult males' from their barely black appearance. He notes that it was accepted that cheetahs were trained to hunt only black-coloured buck, in other words, only the largest males in a herd were taken.
The Akbarnama was written in Persian by Akbar’s court historian and biographer, Abu’l Fazl, between 1590 and 1596, and the V&A’s partial copy of the manuscript is thought to have been illustrated between about 1592 and 1595. This is thought to be the earliest illustrated version of the text, and drew upon the expertise of some of the best royal artists of the time. Many of these are listed by Abu’l Fazl in the third volume of the text, the A’in-i Akbari, and some of these names appear in the V&A illustrations, written in red ink beneath the pictures, showing that this was a royal copy made for Akbar himself. After his death, the manuscript remained in the library of his son Jahangir, from whom it was inherited by Shah Jahan.
The V&A purchased the manuscript in 1896 from Frances Clarke, the widow of Major General John Clarke, who bought it in India while serving as Commissioner of Oudh between 1858 and 1862.
