Abu'l Hasan, Nadir al-Zaman

In his memoirs for 1618, Jahangir wrote that Abu'l Hasan the painter, titled Nadir al-Zaman, had drawn his accession as the frontispiece of the Jahangir-nama; that he had no rival or equal in his day; that there was no comparison between him and his father Aqa Riza; and that the emperor had reared him until his art reached this rank. No other painter received such homage. ¹

A drawing of St John after an engraving by Albrecht Dürer, made by Abu'l Hasan in 1009 AH/1600–1601 "in my thirteenth year", dates his birth to 997 AH/1588–89. A portrait of him by Daulat in the margins of the Gulshan Album shows that he was left-handed. This is more than we know of any other major Mughal painter; the rest comes from his paintings. ¹

His earliest fully mature work is a page in the British Library Anwar-i-Suhaili finished in 1610, signed humbly "dust of the threshold of Riza", beside pages by his father; already his lines follow the texture and fall of cloth rather than serve surface pattern, and his faces are individual and expressive. ¹ He used European prints for shading, and his later works are notable for mass and dark shadowed backgrounds. ^{1 2} An Infant Prince (Shah Shuja) follows an English portrait type brought by Sir Thomas Roe in 1615. ² Milo Cleveland Beach counts his portraits among the most penetrating in Mughal art and finds no evidence that he painted beyond the first years of Shah Jahan's reign. ²