Bishandas

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Bishandas: Birth of a Prince , miniature around 1620. The prince is probably Jahangir himself, as the miniature comes from his biography Jahangirnama .

Bishandas (also Bishan Das , Bishndas , Bishn Das , Beshandas , Bishnandas , Vishnudasa , Vishnu Dasa ; * unknown, † after 1650 ) was an important miniature painter in the Indian Mughal Empire . He is considered one of the best Mughal portraitists of his time. Bishandas was the nephew of the painter Nanha . His name is an indication that he probably belonged to the Hindu faith.

Life

He worked from around 1590 in the studio of the Mughal emperor Akbar I (r. 1556 to 1605). He achieved great fame under Akbar's successor Jahangir (r. 1605 to 1627), who appreciated him as an outstanding portraitist. Jahangir sent Bishandas with an embassy to the court of the Persian Shah Abbas I in Isfahan in 1613 to make portraits of the ruler and his followers. After his return in 1620 he was rewarded with an elephant by the Mughal emperor. Bishanda's activity ended around 1650 and the date of his death is unknown. A portrait of him has come down to us from the miniature painter Daulat , who depicted him in a border painting of the Gulshan album ( Muraqqa-e-Gulshan , around 1605).

Services

Bishanda's individual style is characterized by carefully observed physiognomic subtleties. He achieved the realistic representation of his figures less through shading and spatial effect than through gestures and detailed facial features. In this he differed from earlier portraitists, who depicted facial features in a more schematic way. He often grouped the figures he portrayed, a feature that can be recognized to a greater extent in his later works. One of his most famous works is the miniature Birth of a Prince (around 1620), an illustration from Jahangir's biography Jahangirnama .

literature

  • Günter Meißner ( greetings ): General artist lexicon (Volume 11: Biklar - Bobrov). KG Saur Verlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-598-22751-5 .