Get a close up of The Indian Portrait show

The Indian Portrait analyses the period from the height of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the Raj period in the 18th. The art synthesised the Mughals’ Persian history with the Western art that had an increasing presence in the Mughal court in Delhi. From the West came a new realism in faces and the introduction of equestrian portraiture, for instance, but the decorative brilliance, mineral hues and spatial flatness of earlier Indian and Persian art remained.

The bulk of the show is dedicated to paintings made for the Mughal court and those created in the Rajput courts largely in the north of India, which were under imperial rule and therefore receptive to Mughal influence, but maintained a distinct painting style.

The works created for successive Mughal emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan are immaculately ordered, finely detailed and cleanly drawn, a combination at its height in a wonderful painting of four of Jahangir’s courtiers.

Rajput paintings, meanwhile, are often more exuberantly coloured and freer in composition — particularly striking is the vividly hued painting of a Raja and his servant, in which the ruler’s size is vastly exaggerated to reflect his superior status.

The show has its problems — most of the paintings were intended to be seen in books, not on gallery walls, so their fragility dictates that the lighting is duller than one would like, and colours can’t sing as they should. And the final room of works made during British colonial rule falls flat ­— the bright hues, spatial complexity and inventive compositions of before have largely vanished.
From tomorrow until 20 June (020 7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk)

The Indian Portrait 1560-1860
National Portrait Gallery
WC2