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Sotheby's
Auctions » Arts of the Islamic World, including
20th Century Middle Eastern Paintings » lot 23
Sale L03220
Battle scene with an 'ayyar', probably Khaja Umar
the master spy and friend of Amir Hamza, being
lifted into the sky, illustrated page from the
Emperor Akbar's manuscript of the Hamza Nama,
Mughal, c.1570
London, Bond Street 8,000—12,000 GBP Session
1
30 Apr 03 10:30 AM
MEASUREMENTS
65.5 by 49.8cm.
DESCRIPTION
gouache with gold on cotton, numbered 37 in black
at top, laid down on card, slightly reduced
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Provenance:
Property of the European collector Gabriel Latombe
(d.1938), hence by descent.
A previously unrecorded page from the vast Qissa-i Amir
Hamza or Hamza Nama, painted for the emperor Akbar.
Akbar's Hamza Nama is a celebrated work that has been
described in every major book on Indian and Mughal art.
More recently, all the known leaves from this manuscript
were regrouped in an exhaustive publication (Seyller
2002) accompanying the touring exhibition 'The Adventures
of Hamza', started 2002 at the Freer Gallery of Art and
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, and opening March
2002 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The
present page, which has only just come to light, was
unknown at the time of publication and thus it was not
included in this exhibition catalogue. It is a new and
rare addition to the approximately 179 extant
illustrations (some fragments) from this renowned work,
which is believed to originally have included 1400
illustrations.
Akbar was a supreme patron of the arts, architecture,
philosophy, literature, music and multi-cultural
religion. The commissioning of the Hamza Nama was the
first great artistic undertaking of his reign. The Hamza
Nama is the principle cornerstone of early Mughal
painting and one of the most innovative of all oriental
manuscripts. Its enormous size and startling compositions
were quite without precedent and were never attempted
again. The manuscript is a romance of the mythical
adventures of Amir Hamza, the uncle of the Prophet
Muhammad, who is transformed by the tale into a chivalric
hero who travels the world fighting infidels and dragons.
Although the legends of the Amir Hamza go back at least
to the eleventh century, Akbar's Hamza Nama represents a
unique form of the text, derived as it was from an oral
tradition. In this version it was possibly never finished
and remains unpublished. Work on the manuscript had
almost certainly begun by 1564, since the chronicler
Abu'l-Fazl describes parts of the text being read out to
Akbar during an elephant hunt near Narwar in that year
(Abu'l-Fazl, 1907-39, II, p.343). The Hamza Nama is said
to have taken fifteen years to complete. It was described
as being in twelve vast unsewn volumes, painted on
cotton, with a total of some fourteen hundred paintings
with text on their versos. Fifty artists are said to have
worked on its illustrations. Akbar's father Humayun had
summoned to India the greatest book illuminators of
Persia, including Mir Sayyid `Ali and `Abd al-Samad, who
had worked on the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, and both
artists were employed to supervise the Hamza Nama
project.
Stylistically the Hamza Nama already shows the fusion of
Indian and Persian art which came to characterise Mughal
art for two centuries, with influences from Europe and
the Far East. These form a graphic reflection of Akbar's
own fascination with the civilisations of all nations,
and the Hamza Nama has been described as the
quintessential Indian work of art in its seizing and
adapting the best from all cultures. ``The style of the
Hamza Nama is broadly Iranian... Yet the Indian
architectural details... are immediately striking. Broad
swathes of brilliant crimson sometimes cut across the
composition, a feature of indigenous traditions
translated into the new style. The vibrancy of the
paintings ... gives them a character all of their own.
The liveliness of the scenes compensates for the
sometimes crudely applied paint, which contrasts with the
delicacy and precision of the arabesque and geometric
decoration on walls and floors, textiles and armour''
(Guy and Swallow, pp.67-9). ``The Hamza pages... startle
us with Dionysiac turbulence, broad handling, and
strident expressive colour'' (Welch, 1963, p.24).
The Hamza Nama was described as being in the library of
Akbar at the end of his life, and it was inherited by
Jahangir (1605-28) and Shah Jahan (1628-59). It probably remained intact in the
royal palace at Delhi until the Mughal collections were
looted during Nadir Shah's sack of the city in 1739 when
many leaves of the book were taken back to Persia and
almost all faces depicted in the Hamza Nama were
deliberately smudged. Other leaves from the great
book remained in the ruined palace of Delhi, which was
sacked by Ahmad Shah Adbali in 1757 and captured by the
British in 1803 and 1857. Some remaining leaves of the
Hamza Nama were evidently still in India, and some were
found in the late nineteenth century covering the windows
of a tea shop in Kashmir (Clarke, p.ii). Of the
approximately one hundred and seventy nine paintings
still extant, most are in the Austrian Museum of Art and
Industry in Vienna (Gluck, 1925, and Hamza-Nama, 1974)
and in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Hamza-Nama, 1982).
Others are divided among the Chester Beatty Library, the
Fogg Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Many are more-or-less
defaced and some are only fragments of pages.
For Further Reading:
Thanks and best wishes,
J. Barry O'Connell Jr.
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