File:Self-Portrait of Farrukh Beg.jpg

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Description

Self-Portrait of Farrukh Beg: Page from a Muraqqa of Shah Jahan Farrukh Beg

Date:

   ca. 1615

Culture:

   India (Mughal court at Agra)

Medium:

   Opaque watercolor and ink on paper

Dimensions:

   Painting: 5 13/16 x 2 7/8 in. (14.7 x 7.3 cm) Page: 21 15/16 x 13 11/16 in. (55.7 x 34.8 cm)

Classification:

   Paintings

Credit Line:

   Lent by the Eva and Konrad Seitz Collection

Rights and Reproduction:

   Eva and Konrad Seitz Collection

This artwork is not on display

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   Description
   This portrait of an elderly man, identified by inscription as the work of Farrukh Beg, is a presumed self-portrait, although the inscription allows scope for ambiguity. It is a measure of the status and esteem in which Farrukh Beg was held at court; rarely would an artist presume to undertake such a personal work. The artist is depicted as an old man standing amid a flowering landscape and leaning contemplatively upon a long staff. The flowering bush and skyline with horizontal clouds embody elements from his Deccan years. As in those works, the landscape is not of this world but rather an imagined place. This page bears a colophon by the emperor Shah Jahan indicating it once formed part of a muraqqa (album) in the imperial library. The album was presumably inherited from his father, Jahangir, under whose patronage Farrukh Beg worked in his last years.
   About the Artist
   Farrukh Beg
   Born in Iran ca. 1545, active 1580s–1615, at the Mughal courts in Kabul, Lahore, Agra, and the Sultanate of Bijapur, died in Agra ca. 1619
   Few Mughal painters have such a catalogue of praise from their patrons. Farrukh Beg was first noted as Farrukh Husayn in the early 1580s in the service of the Safavid Shah Khodabanda, in
   Kabul, working for Akbar’s brother. In 1585, while serving Akbar at Lahore, he was singled out for praise as Farrukh Beg (beg is an honorific title, perhaps conferred by Akbar) in Abu’l Fazl’s official biography of Akbar, Akbarnama, alongside the unsurpassed Daswant. By 1590, he was attached to Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II’s atelier in Bijapur, where his astonishing skill was praised by the court poet. In 1609, he appeared in Jahangir’s memoirs as “one of the peerless of his age.” It seems that the apparent freedom he enjoyed was commensurate with his talent.
   Farrukh Beg contributed to Akbar’s major commissions of the day, the Baburnama (1589) and the first illustrated edition of the Akbarnama (probably 1589–90). His painting Akbar’s Entry into Surat is one of the greatest works of that remarkable manuscript, subtly blending Timurid and Mughal conventions into a new vision of startling sophistication, but not in keeping with the earthy realism that appears to have been the official agenda, to mirror the aspirations that Akbar’s biography would eulogize the emperor as a history maker. A favored subject was youthful and graceful men in a flowering landscape, a well-established theme in Persian painting and one to which Farrukh Beg returned in his last years. While some of these works are clearly portraits, others seem to have a more poetic intent. His Bijapur sojourn produced a series of pictures unprecedented in Mughal India. In Ibrahim Adil Shah II hawking, he self-consciously reintroduced the mannerisms of Persian landscape painting and fused them with the newly emerging European-inspired approach to pictorial space. It is above all a landscape of the mind, extraordinary, highly individualistic, and unprecedented.
Farrukh Beg’s masterful vision of a melancholy Sufi brings together much that distinguished his life’s achievement. The work marks his only known use of European models, here transformed by the radical chromatic experiments of his Bijapur works into a mannerist painting distinguished by surreal coloring and modeling of form. That it was created in his seventieth year, the same year as a self-portrait very close in mood, makes it all the more compelling. Farrukh Beg ignored even nominal elements of perspective and instead treated surface decor as paramount in his highly individualistic, singular style.
Date circa 1615
date QS:P,+1615-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1480,Q5727902
Source https://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/60050390?rpp=20&pg=2&ft=jahangir&pos=23
Author

Date:

   ca. 1615

Culture:

India (Mughal court at Agra)
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Licensing[edit]

Public domain
This work is in the public domain in India because its term of copyright has expired.

The Indian Copyright Act applies in India to works first published in India. According to the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, as amended up to Act No. 27 of 2012 (Chapter V, Section 25):

  • Anonymous works, photographs, cinematographic works, sound recordings, government works, and works of corporate authorship or of international organizations enter the public domain 60 years after the date on which they were first published, counted from the beginning of the following calendar year (i.e. as of 2024, works published prior to 1 January 1964 are considered public domain).
  • Posthumous works (other than those above) enter the public domain after 60 years from publication date, counted from the beginning of the following calendar year.
  • Any kind of work other than the above enters the public domain 60 years after the author's death (or in the case of a multi-author work, the death of the last surviving author), counted from the beginning of the following calendar year.
  • Text of laws, judicial opinions, and other government reports are free from copyright.
The Indian Copyright Act, 1957 is not retroactive, so any work in which copyright did not subsist when it commenced did not have its copyright restored, and is in the public domain per the Copyright Act 1911.

You must also include a United States public domain tag to indicate why this work is in the public domain in the United States. Note that this work might not be in the public domain in countries that do not apply the rule of the shorter term and have copyright terms longer than life of the author plus 60 years. In particular, Mexico is 100 years, Jamaica is 95 years, Colombia is 80 years, Guatemala and Samoa are 75 years, and Switzerland and the United States are 70 years.


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