As many of my supporters know, my online lectures on Global Art History are about the Decorative Arts in the Islamic World and Asia. They rely heavily on good pictures, many of which I find in the online databases of museums' collections. Sometimes I also create content from scratch, making drawings and illustrations that I hope will clarify a story and inspire my audience - particularly the many visual artists and craftspeople in our community.
In preparing for "Emperor Jahangir's Flowers" I felt moved to recreate one of the flowers we see in the borders of 17th century Mughal album pages. This innovative idea was introduced by Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605 - 1627) in collaboration with his favourite artists, and exploited even further under the patronage of his son and successor Shah Jahan (r. 1628 - 1658). The detail above comes from a folio of the Shah Jahan Album at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The artists often traced the patterns from master drawings kept in the Imperial studios, or from the library collections - Jahangir was an assiduous collector of European prints, and encouraged his artists to emulate images found in European horticultural albums, for example. The artists used a painstaking process of transferring their images to a folio page. The lines of a tracing were pricked with a needle, so that when a tiny bag of powdered charcoal was rubbed over the lines, a faint dotted image would be left on the new page. Not my favourite process, as the dots rub off very easily, and drawing over the impressions with a fine brush requires a deal of concentration!
I used the classic formula to build up the image, first blocking in the main colours, then adding the detailing, and finally applying the 24 carat gold outlines that make the image 'pop'.
The image below shows the hand-made colours used in this example - malachite green, and red lead, You can see the heaviness of their texture in the cross-lit picture after polishing with an agate burnisher.
