Prince Sulayman Shikuh in conversation with a scholar

Mughal, attributed to Chitarman, circa 1655

Footnotes

Provenance
Sotheby's London, 5th July 1982, lot 2.
Formerly in the collection of Ludwig Habighorst.

Published
C. P. Haase, J. Kröger, and U. Lienert, Oriental Splendour: Islamic Art from German Private Collections, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe: Temmen, Hamburg 1993, fig. 190a.
L. V. Habighorst, 'Hierarchie und Module', Tribus 55, 2006, pp. 53–65, fig. 2.
L. V. Habighorst, Blumen, Baume, Gottergarten in indischen Miniaturen, Koblenz 2011, fig. 76.

Exhibited
Blumen, Bäume, Göttergärten, Völkerkunde-Museum, Hamburg, 2013.


Prince Sulayman Shikuh (1635-62) and a learned man named on the reverse as the Shaykh Sulayman Hazrat, whose identity is not yet clear, are seated under a tree having a discussion. The prince was the eldest son of Dara Shikuh and met the same fate as his father – after fleeing to Garhwal he was eventually betrayed and ended his days in the fortress of Gwalior, slowly dying through the administering of a daily overdose of drugs as ordered by Aurangzeb.

This portrait is one of the few showing the prince in his maturity, but his resemblance to his father is clear. Double portraits of the prince with his father (listed by Joachim Bautze in Haase et al., p. 276) show him to be a
slightly shorter version of Dara Shikuh and he also shared the same interests in philosophy and mysticism. Both are the same size and on the same level, balanced across the painting and beneath a spreading tree that serves, as Habighorst points out, not to give them shade but as a sort of baldachin or canopy. Both are seated on their individual mats – of cream textile patterned with stylized flowers in the prince's case, and a leopard skin in the mystic's – which are spread on a dark brown durrie that covers the bottom of the paintings.

The tree, painted in a naturalistic manner, rises straight from behind the durrie in front of a plain green hillside. Such a plain background is very much in the manner of Hashim, in his imperial descent portraits (see J. P. Losty, and M. Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, London 2012, pp. 113-114, fig. 64,; J. Seyller 'Hashim' in Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, Bombay 1991, ed. P. Pal, pp. 105-181, fig. 10), sometimes with a plane tree in this position. However in view of the known connection of the artist Chitarman with Dara Shikoh's patronage beginning with his Album and his many portraits of the prince (Losty and Roy 2012, pp 124-31, p. 241, n. 181), there seems no reason to doubt the 18th century attribution to this artist.