The court painting of the Mughal Empire: small, intensely detailed images in opaque watercolour and gold on paper, made in the imperial workshop to illustrate histories, epics, and memoirs or to fill albums. Born when the emperor Humayun brought Persian masters to India and Akbar set them to train a large workshop of mostly Indian painters, many of them Hindu, it fused Persian elegance, Indian colour and vigour, and, increasingly, European devices into one of the supreme schools of painting. It flowered under Akbar, refined under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and dispersed to regional courts as imperial patronage faded.
A single Mughal page can be no larger than this screen, and a viewer who leans in finds a whole world inside it. A line thinner than a thread traces a hawk's feather; a crowd of fifty courtiers each wears a distinct face; gold and crushed lapis sit beside a glowing yellow once said to come from the urine of mango-fed cows. These were painted in a Muslim emperor's workshop, mostly by Indian artists, many of them Hindu, in a style first taught by Persian masters, with European tricks of shadow creeping in at the edges. The art that recorded the Mughal court was itself the empire in miniature: three traditions, one hand, held together on a sheet of paper.