Abu al-Hasan

Abu al-Hasan was born in 1589 into the household of Prince Salim, the future emperor Jahangir, where his father served as a court painter from Herat in Persia. He grew up inside the workshop, and the prince who would one day rule much of India watched his talent from the start.

When Salim took the throne as Jahangir, he made Abu al-Hasan his favorite painter and gave him the title Nadir al-Zaman, Wonder of the Age. Jahangir, a ruler who wrote candidly about art in his memoirs, declared the painter had no equal. Abu al-Hasan portrayed the emperor again and again in deliberately loaded images, standing on a globe, haloed like the sun, in one famous scene embracing his Persian rival Shah Abbas to display a supremacy Jahangir wished for but did not hold.

He also copied European prints of Christian subjects that reached the Mughal court through traders and Jesuit missions. After Jahangir's death in 1627 his output thins, and there is no clear record of him painting past 1628.