Artwork story
About "Black Buck", Folio from the Shah Jahan Album
The artist and artwork
Attributed to the Mughal court painter Manohar, Black Buck was painted around 1615–20 in ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper. Manohar, a son of the painter Basawan, worked across the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir and became known for closely observed figures, animals, and court events. He isolates a blackbuck in profile, recording its white face, pale underparts, and long spiraling horns against a dark olive field.
The world around it
The painting belongs to the imperial album culture cultivated by Jahangir, who ruled the Mughal empire from 1605 to 1627 and valued natural observation and the recognizable hands of individual artists. Jahangir began the album now called the Shah Jahan Album; his son Shah Jahan inherited and expanded it after taking the throne in 1628. Such muraqqa albums assembled paintings, treasured calligraphy, and designed borders, turning works from different places and generations into objects of imperial connoisseurship.
A detail to notice
The blackbuck painting is square, but its album window is tall. Rather than enlarge the animal scene, the album makers filled the extra space with two poetry leaves set on diagonals above and below it. The Met says these strips may have come from an oblong safina manuscript; the lower one contains a verse by Jami and is signed in a triangular panel by the Persian calligrapher Sultan 'Ali Mashhadi. Jahangir's memoirs mention his fondness for a favorite decoy black buck, and Manohar painted several versions of the subject. That attachment changes the image from a general nature study into something closer to a portrait. The lone animal stands alert but unthreatened in an empty field, while gilded divisions, calligraphy, and flowering borders build a world around its stillness. The page preserves a conversation among a Mughal animal painter, older Persian poetry and calligraphy, and later album designers.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is album leaf made in Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper and held in the Islamic Art department.
Recorded dimensions include H. 15 3/8 in. (39 cm); W. 10 1/4 in. (26 cm).
Subject terms include Animals, Flowers, and Leaves. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Purchase, Rogers Fund and The Kevorkian Foundation Gift, 1955.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23T20:04:15.766Z.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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