Emperor Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, North India, probably Agra or Rajasthan, 1760-1800

Acquired by Cary Welch before 1978

S.C. Welch, Room for Wonder, New York, 1978, no.60, pp.134-5

R. Skelton, The Indian Heritage, Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule, London, 1982, no.88, p.50

P. Pal, J. Leoskho, J. Dye and S. Markel, Romance of the Taj Mahal, Los Angeles and London, 1989, fig.58, pp.69,74

V. Berinstain, India and the Mughal Dynasty, New York, 1997, p.85

A. Schimmel, Im Reich Der Grossmoguln, Geschichte, Kunst, Kultur, Munich, 2000, p.369

A. Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughal, History, Art and Culture, translated by Corinne Atwood, London, 2004, fig.118, p.301

K. Corrigan, Taj Mahal, The Building of a Legend, Salem, MA, 2005, p.25

M. Fraser, Selected Works from the Stuart Cary Welch Collection of Indian and Islamic Art, London, 2015, cat.36, pp.122-5

Room for Wonder, Indian Painting during the British Period, 1760-1880, The American Federation for the Arts, New York, 1978-79

The Indian Heritage, Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1982

On loan at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1983

Romance of the Taj Mahal, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1989-90

Taj Mahal, The Building of a Legend, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, 2000-06

The Sea in a Jug: The Welch Collection of Islamic and Later Indian Art, Colby Museum of Art, Maine, 2020

This large painting of Emperor Akbar’s Tomb complex at Sikandra near Agra is a splendid representation of this important Mughal building. Using a striking combination of view-points, projections and perspective, it wonderfully evokes the rich architecture and lush formal gardens of Akbar's mausoleum and gardens.

The tomb complex as a whole is viewed from high above, but the individual buildings are viewed frontally, each represented as a separate observation as if the artist were standing directly in front of each building and wall in turn. The main buildings down the centre of the composition are depicted using perspective, although the viewpoint of each varies – the lower and upper buildings being viewed from a low point with the façade dominating and little evidence of the roof, and the central building (the tomb building itself) being viewed from a higher point showing the roof. The four corner towers are seen in elevation with no perspective. The outer walls and the low wall round the main tomb building are seen frontally, but since they are lateral, the effect is that they appear to splay out as if flattened on the ground, and the gates at the mid-points of the two side walls as well as the upper register of the outer walls slant away from the viewer, introducing an unsettling sense of instability. Finally, the human figures, fountains and trees are seen from the side, but the layout of the compartmentalised grass lawns and pools of water along the central vertical axis is seen from above.

The whole composition is a splendid mixture of traditional Indian spatial techniques and nascent European-influenced ones, creating an inspiring architectural tableau that is simultaneously confusing and easily readable. The aim of the artist was to portray as much as possible to the viewer, abandoning reality for a visual experience that approximates to a whole tour of the complex in one image, and in this the painting is highly successful.

The painting has been attributed to the second half of the 18^th century and its origins suggested as Jaipur, Agra and the Mughal School in general (Welch 1978, p.134, Pal 1989, p.69; Skelton 1982, p.50). A close observation of the small white figures of gardeners, cart-driver and other characters reveals a resemblance to the type found in Mughal works of the late 18^th century, but the multiple viewpoints and variable projections with which the scene is depicted suggests Rajasthani influence. Two other near-identical versions of this composition survive, both of a similar size to the present example. One is in the British Library, London, Or.Add.4202, and the other was published by Francesca Galloway in 2000 as part of a set of three architectural scenes all of the same type and size (Galloway 2000, no.49A, pp.106-7). The version in the British Library, which is fully coloured and closest to the present work, is dated to 1780-1800. The ex-Galloway example was a thinly coloured drawing and may have been a preparatory sketch for either the present work or the British Library painting, or an unfinished version itself. One of the other sketches in the Galloway set, depicting the Red Fort at Agra, has an identical counterpart in the Victoria and Albert Museum (IS.153-1984). The latter is datable to before 1803. The third sketch in the Galloway set depicted the Taj Mahal. It seems highly likely that all six of these related works were produced in the same location, and the focus on architectural monuments in and around Agra strongly suggests an origin there.

The inscription on the reverse of the present work is in an English hand of the late 18^th or early 19^th century and must therefore represent a very early owner of the painting, possibly its original owner. (The spelling of the word 'Imperaur' is certainly archaic). It may be that artists in Agra were producing paintings such as these for some of the early European visitors in the late 18^th century, at a time when the European style of architectural scenes that became one of the mainstays of Company School painting had not yet been taken up by Indian artists.

Akbar’s tomb was a major Mughal monument representing an important stage in the development of Mughal architecture. It was built on the orders of his son, Emperor Jahangir, between 1605 and 1612 on a site chosen by Akbar himself. Stylistically it lies between the Timurid-influenced tomb of Emperor Humayun near Delhi, erected between 1562 and 1571, and romantic grandeur of the Taj Mahal complex at Agra, built from 1632-53, and incorporates influence from pre-Mughal Hindu monuments. The large, segmented garden, divided by stone esplanades with water channels, gives a conscious paradisial context for the tomb and surrounding buildings, and the calligraphic inscriptions on the buildings overtly proclaim this association. The grand entrance gateway is an important building in its own right, with minarets 42 metres (137 feet) high, while the central building rises in tiers of red sandstone to a white marble edifice at the upper level.

Cary Welch’s entry from the catalogue of the 1978 exhibition Room for Wonder included the following:

“This traditional view of a Mughal monument,... enables us simultaneously to see from the sides and from above, and to gain a much fuller idea of each element in the structure. It also produces a highly appealing picture, with no violation of the surface’s two dimensional harmony, and in this case transforms Akbar’s tomb into a sort of mandala, the Buddhist and Hindu psychocosmogram. On the other hand, it tells us very little either about relative proportions – the gardeners are tall as trees – or of the 'feel' of the surfaces. It presents the idea instead of the appearance, the spirit rather than the substance." (Welch 1978, p.134)