Me Sayyid Ali

Portrait of a young Indian scholar , miniature around 1550, executed in Kabul, probably on behalf of the Great Mogul Humayun. The miniature is signed by Mir Sayyid Ali Nadir al-Mulk.

Mir Sayyid Ali (* first quarter of the 16th century in Badakhshan ; † probably 1572 , lost on a pilgrimage to Mecca ) was a Persian - Indian miniature painter . Together with Abd as-Samad he is considered to be the founder of the north Indian Mogul school, which is derived from the Persian tradition of miniature painting. As a poet, he wrote under the pseudonym Juda'i .

Mir Sayyid Ali was the son of the painter Mir Musawwir from Soltaniye . He worked as one of the most respected painters at the court of the Persian Shah Tahmasp I in Tabriz until he entered the service of the Mughal emperor Humayun , who was expelled from India, in 1544/45 together with Abd as-Samad . From this he received the honorary title Nadir al-Mulk ("Highly Praised of the Kingdom"). In 1549 he followed Humayun to Kabul and finally to Delhi in 1555 . Under the mogul Akbar I (ruled 1556 to 1605) he and Abd as-Saman took over the management of the imperial painting school with more than 50 artists.

In Persia, Mir Sayyid Ali was clearly under the influence of the painter Behzad and worked between 1527 and 1545 on illustrations for the epic Shāhnāme and between 1539 and 1543 on the hamsa of the poet Nezāmi . In India he stayed true to the Safavid style of his homeland. Nevertheless, the influences of Indian Rajput painting are unmistakable, for example in the less idealized landscape depiction compared to Persian art. Ali devoted himself primarily to the representation of rural and urban scenes from everyday Indian life and thus developed into one of the most important representatives of genre painting . Due to the precise, realistic reproduction of carefully observed details, his genre pictures are of great value for research into cultural history. Ali's works are also characterized by a lively and harmonious color scheme. In the case of the illustrations for Nizami's epic Leila and Majnun , based on Behzad's descriptions of nature, he broke away from the conventional courtly manner of representation, while his portrayals of people based on the model of Qasim Ali's approaches to a more realistic portrait art, as they were long after Ali's death under the aegis of the Mughal Mughal Jahangir (ruled 1605 to 1627) prevailed. Together with Abd as-Samad, he directed the illustration of the adventure novel Hamzanama in more than 1,400 large-format miniatures, which are among the most outstanding examples of early Mughal art. The exact assignment of individual works to Mir Sayyid Ali is difficult, however, since most of the miniatures from the Akbar period were unsigned and were created in cooperation with one another. Almost all paintings that can be clearly assigned to Ali therefore date from before his arrival in India.

source

• Günter Meißner (abbreviated): General artist lexicon (Volume 2: Alanson - Alvarez). KG Saur Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-22742-6 .