Posted on: 19 December 2011

Portrait of a European - 1590

Europeans first came to the Mughal empire in the late 1570s. By the early 1600s, there was regular contact between the Mughal court and Portuguese Goa, and merchants and adventurers came overland or by sea from Europe. A few of them took up residence at court. Their presence led to the occasional appearance of European figures in Mughal paintings or on the border decoration of manuscripts.

This painting, which on stylistic grounds dates to about 1610, is unlikely to be a contemporary portrait of a 17th-century European visitor to the Mughal court, however. Details of his dress (the pinked boots and the open-fronted ruff) are seen in European portraits of the 1580s, while the hilt of the rapier may date from as early as the 1560s, suggesting that the Mughal artist used a painting as his model.

Source : V&A, London


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Hello, If you liked this portrait, you might like a book that I have just read. It is by R.E Pritchard called "Peter Mundy, Merchant Adventurer" published by the Bodleian Library. It contains a lot of extracts from his voluminous diaries, and contains lots of Mundy's sketches of events from India showing Indian scenes as he saw them through European eyes. The sheer number of sailors and merchants who died on these voyages is extraordinary. One wonders how they ever got crews together. The amount of dacoity and extortion that both the European's as well as the Indian merchants experienced at the hands of officials is quite extraordinary as these merchants penetrated inland all the way from Surat to places as far away as Patna also makes it hard to fathom why anybody volunteered for the task. The breakdown of local society caused by the extortion and robbery by Indian on Indian must have been well advanced well before the European's arrived, and perhaps it this was this lawlessness and the fractured nature of local societies that made it so easy for later arriving European's to take over so much territory so relatively easily. Nick Balmer

Thank you Nick Balmer for sharing your interesting insights of the period. Will definitely post Peter Mundy's - Asian travel journals, published by the Hakluyt Society