A Zebra Presented to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir

Mansur, A zebra presented to the Mughal emperor, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, 1621

Today we have a fun little watercolour to discuss, and that of a very special and beautiful sitter; a zebra! A few years ago I wrote about Pietro Longhi’s paintings of Clara the Rhinocerus and about the fascination that the people in the Rococo Venice had for this strange, exotic but sweet animal. Clara was all the rage for Venetians at the time, a celebrity almost! It seems that an African zebra had the same effect on the Mughal court and most of all on the fourth Mughal emperor Jahangir who was a great patron of the arts and luckily had court painters appointed to capture the sight. In 1621 a delegation presented the emperor with exotic animals and one of them was a zebra; an animal that he had never seen before. Jahangir, upon seeing the strange exotic animal, had the same thought as I do too; that it looks like a horse with stripes! He jotted down in his notebooks: “One might say the painter of fate, with a strange brush, had left it on the page of the world”.

The simple watercolour shows a side-view of a zebra and the watercolour has a border of the typical Mughal flowers, elegant and symetrical, painted in vibrant hues, purple, yellow and red. The vibrancy of the flowers create a great visual contrast with the black and white of the zebra.  There is not much to comment on the zebra itself. We can say that the painter did a good job capturing its beauty and elegance. In particular, the face looks sweet and calm. Also, something more rare for these miniature paintings, is that the name of the painter is known to us; it was Mansur, one of Jahangir’s court painters. Jahangir had asked him to paint the zebra because he intended the painting to be a present for the Shah Abbas of Iran. The writings in the upper right corner were written by Jahangir himself and they explain who painted it and describe the ocassion of zebra’s arrival to the court.

It is fascinating to think just how thrilled and curious Jahangir was to see the exotic animals, the same way the eighteenth century Venetians were to see Clara the Rhinocerus. In those days, before everything was cathegorise and encyclopedia-ised and before all the books that we have now were written, before photography and the internet, to see a zebra or a rhinocorus one really had to see it in person or later on a painting such as this one. Many would probably see this painting and feel great disbelief, and they would wonder whether the painter had taken an artistic liberty with his portrayal of the animal. It cannot really be real, can it?; one might have thought in those days.