Aqā Rizā Haravi

Biography

Aqa Riza signed his pages with the words “faithful servant” or “disciple” and placed the name of Prince Salim next to his own. Sometimes the signature is hidden inside the picture: on a letter or a book in a figure’s hand, and on large pages on a stone at the bottom. The prince’s name always stands above the artist’s.

Where he was born is not known for certain. His son, Abu’l Hasan, called himself “Mashhadi” and “dust at the threshold of Riza”, which points to a family link with Mashhad. In Jahangir’s memoirs the painter’s name is connected with Merv and Herat, hence the name Haravi. His years of birth and death are also unknown: about 1560 is given for his birth, and his works can be traced into the 1610s, to about 1610 according to some accounts and to about 1621 according to others. How he was trained, the documents do not say. His early miniatures are close to the manner of the royal workshop under Shah Tahmasp I, and scholars suppose that he took his first steps in a Persian setting; one hypothesis names as his teacher some Tabriz master in the circle of Ibrahim Mirza in Mashhad. There is no direct evidence, nor is there a single confirmed work made in Persia. The reasons for his departure to India are unknown.

In Kabul, at the “alternative court” of Salim, the son of the emperor Akbar, Aqa Riza appeared, probably, in the 1580s. The indirect argument is this: his son Abu’l Hasan was born around 1588 and called himself “khanazad”, that is, born at court. The prince liked the Persian manner and collected, unlike his father, not manuscripts but single pages for muraqqa albums, in which Persian and Mughal miniatures stood beside European engravings. The painter worked briefly in Agra, and in 1599, when Salim left for Allahabad with his troops and set up an almost independent court there, he followed him. The workshop, which Aqa Riza, it seems, headed, brought together Mansur, Mirza Ghulam, Nanha and Bishan Das. Before 1610 it illustrated at least three manuscripts: the “Divan” of Amir Khusrau Dehlavi (14 miniatures, 1602–1603, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore), the “Raj Kunwar” (51 miniatures, 1603–1604, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin) and the “Anvar-i Suhayli” (36 miniatures, 1604–1610, British Library, London). In the last of these Aqa Riza himself signed five pages and dated them 1604–1605; in these scenes the carpets, the tiles on the walls and the flowering trees are arranged on Persian models. One of his best miniatures there is called “The Feast of the King of Yemen”.

In the second half of his life his name is also tied to the album “Muraqqa-i Gulshan”, which Jahangir assembled from about 1599 to 1609. Most of the album is kept in the Golestan Palace Library in Tehran, while individual pages have scattered among museums and private collections. Aqa Riza’s portraits and marginal drawings appear there. In the margins of one page he drew figures in Mughal and European dress, and on the faces he used shading to model the form, the only noticeable Mughal novelty in his manner. Separate portraits, for example “Elegant Gentleman Seated under a Willow” (about 1600, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), follow the Safavid scheme: a man with a musical instrument on a stool under a tree.

In 1605 he also took part in decorating the tomb of Shah Begum, Jahangir’s wife, in the Khusrau Bagh garden outside the walls of Allahabad. This shows that he worked on more than book miniatures.

When on 24 October 1605 Salim took the throne in Agra under the name Jahangir, the workshop moved after him. Scholars believe that the emperor’s taste changed quickly and that the father’s more archaic manner no longer satisfied him. Whether Aqa Riza headed the Agra workshop for long is hard to say: most likely he did not. Favour fell to his son Abu’l Hasan, who received the title “Wonder of the Age”. In his memoirs Jahangir wrote that the son’s works could not be compared with the father’s. A second son, Abid, also became a painter. Aqa Riza himself went on working in the imperial workshop. His late pages he signed “Aqa Riza Jahangiri”. “Youth Fallen from a Tree” (about 1610, Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows a boy who robbed a nest and was injured in the fall, his grieving father, and a Sufi trying to console him. The gestures here are more dramatic and the faces more psychological than in his early works, but the decorative basis remains Persian. It seems to me the best evidence of his attempt to join his earlier manner to the emperor’s new taste.