Complete Description
Pigments et or sur papier, le musicien vêtu d’une robe rose et d’une cape bleue, jouant de la cornemuse et d’une harpe ou vina, assis sur une peau de félin et adossé à un arbre dans un paysage de collines, la peinture montée sur carton enluminé de style Qajar.
Dim.: 11 x 7 cm (peinture) ; 29,4 x 19,2 cm (page)
This painting is an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century version of a Mughal original executed around 1600, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, inv. M.80.6.7). This allegory of a musician dressed in European attire playing the bagpipe and an Indian harp derives from representations of the philosopher Plato in Arabo-Persian culture: Aflatun (Plato) is depicted playing music to animals in order to tame them, using an instrument he is said to have invented himself (see inv. Or. 12208, f. 298, in the British Library, London).
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Iranian artists such as Muhammad Zaman and Ali Quli Jabbadar had access to Mughal paintings, which they copied faithfully. Our painting may be a Persian copy of the Mughal original in the LACMA. Its execution supports a dating to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
