The Rich Man and Lazarus: a Mughal drawing after an engraving by Jan Sadeler of Jacopo Bassano's painting, India, Mughal, early 17th century

ink and pencil on paper, heightened with gold

Private Collection, France
Private Collection, New Jersey

In good overall condition, minor nibbles to leaf edges, slight areas of rubbing, framed, as viewed.
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The copying of European prints by Mughal artists was a popular trend in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, actively patronised by the Mughal emperors and other patrons. This is an important and interesting Mughal drawing based closely on an engraving by Jan Sadeler (1550-1600), the well-known Flemish engraver, of an oil painting entitled Dives and Lazarus by Jacopo Bassano (1505-92). The story of the rich man (called Dives) and Lazarus comes in the Gospel of St. Luke, chapter 16, verses 19-31, and was a popular subject for painters and print-makers in Europe. Many versions exist, both in oil on canvas and print versions, focussing on the scene described in the first three verses:

"19 There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day
20 And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,
21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores,"
(Authorised King James Version)

However, the specific details of the Mughal drawing here indicate that it was Sadeler's engraving that provided the model for the present work. Numerous details from Sadeler's engraving are present here: the table at which Dives sits counting his money; the adjacent table on which a cook is preparing a fowl; the game hanging from a suspended frame behind; the owls on the roof in the background, the distant trees; the architectural fireplace; the rows of plates on a dresser; Lazarus himself at the lower right; the dogs; the woman using the mortar and pestle; the design of the table on which the mortar rests; the figure cooking on a spit; the cauldron heating in the fire-place; the monkey; the boy bending over baskets of fruit; the figure carrying buckets of water on a shoulder pole; the baskets of fish, and so on. However, in changing the format of the page from the landscape of Sadeler's engraving to the portrait format of the Mughal drawing, the artist has altered some spatial aspects of the composition, principally in moving the two large tables (the one at which Dives sits and the one used for preparing the fowl) next to each other and reversed. Further changes include the figure cooking on a spit moving to the bottom left corner and changing from female to male, and likewise the figure carrying water at left. The water bottle hanging from Lazarus's waist has changed from a basic gourd to a rather elegant gold bottle and the dogs that lick his sores have been moved away from him towards the small table, and the rows of plates have moved from the dresser to an outside wall at the back. Some of these changes indicate that the Mughal artist did not understand the original parable, which was normal in the context of Mughal versions of European prints of Biblical and mythological subjects. Furthermore, the two swordsmen in the lower left of the present work do not belong in the scene of The Rich Man and Lazarus, but seem to be an interpolation from a different European print, possibly a scene such as the Massacre of the Innocents.

Sadeler's engraving was produced towards the end of the sixteenth century - he died in Venice in 1600 - and was no doubt among the numerous prints of Biblical subjects taken to India by Jesuit missionaries and other European travellers, diplomats and merchants in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century (probably the third Jesuit Mission, 1595 onwards; for a succinct discussion see Bailey 1998).