Untitled

ca. 1610 - ca. 1615

Painting, in opaque watercolour, gold and probably silver on paper, this album page depicts two men in Persian-style dress within a landscape. The younger man on the right hand side, shown in three-quarter pose facing left, has a grey peregrine falcon perched on his gloved right hand, while offering it a piece of meat in his left hand. Seated between the two men is a hunting cheetah looking back over its shoulder at the young falconer. The other man on the left hand side is older with a long greying beard, also in a three-quarter pose facing his companion with his hands outstretched towards him and a long thin cane resting against the inner side of his right elbow. The landscape background is painted in a style partly derivative of Persian painting in its detailed modelling of the centrally placed tree in the middle distance and piled up knobbly rocks rendered in tints of green and pale pink with other trees sprouting from them, all against a golden background. On the right hand side of this middle distance a group of domed buildings is shown within a clump of small trees with two palms rising above them. The golden background rises up to a sky rendered in a more usual Indian Moghul format of shallow convex streaky lines, beginning with tints in pale orange and mauve rising to hues of deepening blue, all mixed in with lines in white. The figures which are positioned in the lower half of the painting are shown against a pale grey background, which, at the lower right hand edge, has oblong-shaped rocks and flowering plants and one leafy sapling shown at the edge of a sliver of water, now blackened, but probably originally painted in silver. The features of the two figures are painted with extreme delicacy, each hair being individually rendered by the thinnest of brush strokes, such as in the sparse back hair and twisted side lock of the younger man. Both men have loosely wound turbans of a brown and gold banded material. The young man is wearing a mauve-coloured jama with a half-drop gold quatrefoil design clinched in at the waist by a narrow gold and black belt. The jama is shown swept back at the hem with a small sliver of orange lining shown turned back at the front. He wears green boots with black soles and small heels. The older man is more simply dressed with a pale yellow, short-sleeved coat with a fur lining over a long pink robe with a twisted narrowly-striped pale scarf at the waist. He is shod in scarlet slippers. The painting is framed within an inner border of pinkish buff-coloured strips of paper decorated in a stylised manner similar to that seen on page IS.48:29/B-1956 with black and white outlines and a further outer blue outline on the main ivory-coloured border, which is decorated with alternate red poppies and pink lilies outlined and detailed in gold. The margins of the page have applied strips of beige-coloured paper with an inner outline in white. The inner edge has a buff-coloured strip of paper which acts as a gutter for the binding of the album.