Daulat (Mughal painter)

Daulat was a khanazad, "house-born": his father, whose identity is unknown, was in imperial service, presumably as a painter, at Daulat's birth; this is inscribed on his earliest known work, a page of the Delhi Babur-nama of about 1597. ¹ Pages in the Nafahat al-Uns (1603–4) and the Akbar-nama (1604) followed, in a style unusually dependent on areas of pure, bright colour at a time of muted, dark tones. ^{1 2}

By 1609, the date on a border figure in the Gulshan Album, Daulat was a highly skilled portraitist. Among his greatest studies are the marginal portraits of fellow artists — Abu'l Hasan, Bishan Das, Manohar, Govardhan — and of himself, which, for Milo Cleveland Beach, make up for the lack of written notices of these men. ^{3 1}

On a border figure he wrote "Made by the least of the servants, Daulat, of Jahangir Shah" — and since daulat means "empire", it also reads "the least of the servants of the empire of Jahangir Shah". Elsewhere he signed "the faqir Daulat"; these signatures are almost invisible, on a rock under a dervish's feet or at the waterline of a boat. ¹ His style is known by a heavy-featured figure type and densely packed clusters of figures with careful spatial relations, which, for Beach, prepare the compositions of the Padshah-nama. ¹ His last certain works are album pages with purely floral margins from the early years of Shah Jahan. ²