Humayun Seated in a Landscape — Folio from the Late Shah Jahan Album

Emperor Humayun — the second of the Mughal dynasty — seated beside a plane tree in an imagined landscape, examining a jewelled turban ornament set with pearls. The portrait is painted nearly a century after his death, an act of dynastic memory by his great-great-grandson Shah Jahan's court.

The painting is signed "work of Payag" on the base of the tree. Payag was one of the most singular talents of the Mughal workshops — serving Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan across a career of nearly seventy years. He is remembered for absorbing the European illusionism that reached the Mughal court through Jesuit visitors — modelling, chiaroscuro, atmospheric depth — and folding it back into the imperial Persian vocabulary.

The folio belongs to the Late Shah Jahan Album, the imperial compendium compiled in the mid-seventeenth century to commemorate the lineage that produced the workshop itself. Humayun, here, is its quiet origin point: the king whose Persian exile brought back the masters who would teach the painters who painted him.

Restored from the museum archives by aurahliving.com.