The Mughal album (muraqqa')

For Milo Cleveland Beach, Jahangir was less interested than his father in illustrated histories and instead commissioned single pictures of personalities, events or objects that aroused his curiosity; these went into the imperial albums (muraqqas) beside the works he collected from outside the Mughal tradition, so that the albums are complete documents of his taste. They hold Persian, Mughal and Deccani paintings and drawings, European prints, at least one European painting, and Mughal copies and adaptations of all these; Rajput and other Hindu works are conspicuously absent. ²

Turning the pages, two facing illustrations were followed by two pages of calligraphy, and every folio had a border painted mainly in gold — figural borders for calligraphy pages, floral or arabesque ones for paintings. ² Beach sees Mughal artists at their most inventive in these borders, and many of the greatest Mughal portraits are found there, with signed margins by Aqa Riza, Daulat, Balchand, Govardhan and Bishan Das. ^{1 3}

Two large volumes of Jahangir's albums survive: the Gulshan Album in Tehran and the Berlin volume (work dated 1609–18). ² Shah Jahan's albums show a narrower repertoire — mostly single contemporary Mughal portraits, with repeated floral borders — and three large assemblages survive: the Minto, Wantage and Kevorkian Albums, the last two holding many copies made around 1800. ^{4 5} Beach notes that Iran was a major dispersal point for Mughal works from Nadir Shah's sack of Delhi in 1739. ⁵