Payag (Mughal painter)

Milo Cleveland Beach notes that most Mughal painters kept consistent styles throughout their careers, but Payag's earliest paintings do not prepare us for his mature and most famous works. His illustrations in manuscripts of the 1590s, not the great Akbari productions, suggest his talent was not then thought of imperial calibre; after that we know nothing of him until the reign of Shah Jahan, when he painted several of the most brilliant and innovative pages of the Windsor Padshah-nama. ²

A self-portrait on folio 194v of that manuscript shows a foppish courtier at a darbar, inscribed with the information that he was the brother of Balchand, to whom his later style is closest. ² His masterpiece is the Battle Scene from the Padshah-nama, about 1640: massed Mughal troops before a distant fortress, each man minutely portrayed, yet the armies merged into great units, "as if we were looking at flocks of birds", so that individuals are lost — for Beach a deeply Indian attitude, new to seventeenth-century Mughal painting. ^{1 3} His palette is sombre, with gold and colour appearing all the more intensely against it, and in Officers and Wise Men the men sit around a candle, the only light source, a device taken from European chiaroscuro. ²