Miniature pasted on an album leaf. ‘Lovers in a Landscape’
India, Lucknow; 1760-1770
Miniature: 22.2 × 15.2 cm
Like many Mughal artists, Mir Kalan Khan worked in a style that seems quite eclectic. The young, rather irresolute couple seems to be related to the people from Isfahan depicted some 150 years earlier by Riza-i Abbasi, while the more down-to-earth woman entertaining them by playing a long-necked lute is purely Indian. The trees on the right are European, while the indefinable yellow background is quite original – but also very strange.
The artist nonetheless succeeded in creating a painting in which the large plane tree and the foreground in particular – with a lively gathering of animals and birds – are able to bring together the different elements to form a captivating whole.
Inv. no. 50/1981
Published in:
Toby Falk and Douglas Barrett: Gods, gardens and elephants : an exhibition, 17th June to 17th July 1981, Colnaghi, London 1981, cat.no. 10;
Stuart Cary Welch: India: art and culture 1300-1900, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1985, cat.no. 187;
Kjeld von Folsach: Islamic art. The David Collection, Copenhagen 1990, cat.no. 53;
Stephen Markel: “Luxury arts of Lucknow” in Arts of Asia, 1993, 23: March-April, lss. 108-121, pp. 110-111;
Kjeld von Folsach, Torben Lundbæk and Peder Mortensen (eds.): Sultan, Shah and Great Mughal: the history and culture of the Islamic world, The National Museum, Copenhagen 1996, cat.no. 228;
Kjeld von Folsach: Art from the World of Islam in The David Collection, Copenhagen 2001, cat.no. 83;
Kjeld von Folsach: For the Privileged Few: Islamic Miniature Painting from The David Collection, Louisiana, Humlebæk 2007, cat.no. 130;
Molly Emma Aitken: “Parataxis and the practise of reuse, from Mughal margins to Mîr Kalân Khân” in Archives of Asian art, 2009, 59, fig. 10, pp. 98 and 100;
Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude: India's fabled city: the art of courtly Lucknow, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 2010, and Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, Paris 2011, p. 169;
Terence McInerney: “Mir Kalan Khan” in Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, B. N. Goswamy (eds.): Masters of Indian painting, vol. 2, 1650-1900, Zûrich 2011, cat.no. 10, fig. 12;
Kavita Singh: Real birds in imagined gardens: Mughal painting between Persia and Europe, Los Angeles 2017, figs. 1 and 2, pp. 1-11;
Kjeld von Folsach, Joachim Meyer: The Human Figure in Islamic Art – Holy Men, Princes, and Commoners, The David Collection, Copenhagen 2017, cat.no. 53;
Wendy M. K. Shaw: What is "Islamic" art? Between religion and perception, Cambridge 2019, p. 63 and pl. 2;
