| [Contd from Part 3] |
| It has been argued by Dr Brijen Goswamy, an Indian scholar, that this radial diagram of Devi is a contour map of the association of Seu’s family of artists with the patrons in various hill states. If it is, then it would seem to associate the family with all the major centres of Pahari painting. |
| Like sunflowers, professional artists needed to turn for their sustenance in the direction of a radiance emanating from commercial patronage. When that patronage dried up, they moved to even smaller courts. From badshahs to rajas to mirs. Patronage continued, but at a less intense provincial level. Works of art continued to be produced and those of you who have gone around the Talpur collection will recognise the stimulating effect patronage could still provoke among artisans, craftsmen and painters. |
| A portrait of the Mirs in this collection reveals tchnical competence but a famine of inspiartion. Without inspiration, such artists were in danger of becoming a pastiche of themselves. By copying imported British lithographs, they became a pastiche of the work of others. |
| What happened to all the great paintings? Where did they all go? They moved from the possession of patrons into the hands of institutional and individual collectors. |
| The Akbarnama is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where you need to go to see the famous folio illustrating the occasion when Akbar, disgusted by the slaughter of wild animals, decides to abjure hunting. Had Akbar been alive today, he would have been a member of the WWF 1001 Club. |
| The Badshahnama was taken to Windsor Castle and only recently, for the first time in three hundred years, has been seen by a wider public audience. Had Shah Jahan been alive today, he would have risked being arrested for hunting without a valid licence. |
| Sansar Chand’s famous series of Ramayana illustrations have been scattered across the world. What was once the acme of private piety has now become public property. |
| I tried to find one single example which would typify the changing impact of patronage, and I came across this unlikely image which reminded me of Gama pahlwan. General Gul Hassan in his recently published Memoirs mentions an interview between the trotund Governor general Khwaja Nazimuddin and the equally globular Gama pehlwan. The GG referred him to Sir Francis Mudie, the Punjab Governor. General Gul Hassan, his ADC, recalls: `Gama told me he could not make two ends meet, leave alone keep attempting to keep himself in shape… In the princely state of Patiala, he was given a handsome salary and all his nourishment free of cost. Mudie casually asked him how much it amounted to. Gama replied that he did not know the cost but he was provided with the following items daily – six gallons of milk, an equal amount of ghee, etc., ending with twenty pounds of almonds.’ |
| I cannot end this visual feast of the past half hour with this residual image of an overfed, and under-employed pahlwan. |
| Let me conclude, therefore, with a painting from the first Shahnama I showed you. It was painted you remember for the young Shah Tahmasp by his father’s painter Sultan Mohammed, acknowledged as the Zenith of his age. In a contemporary treatise written in 1546, there is a reference to this particular miniature. It identifies the subject as showing `people clothed in leopard skins’. |
| The full miniature shows Gayumars, the first king of Iran, and has rightly been described by Houghton, the American collector who once owned it, as the greatest folio from that Shahnama. It is said that the superb quality of the painting was `such that the hearts of the boldest painters were grieved and they hung their heads in shame before it.’ |
| Can there be a more lyrical final tribute than that to the patron who commissioned it, to the painter who executed it and to the collector who preserved it for us to enjoy? |
