“Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt” and on the Ceiling: Visual reappropriations from Qajar Iran to modern India

Written by Marin Gray, Harvard University

Edited by Iris Bednarski

Fath ‘Ali Shāh stares impassively down at the viewer from the ceiling of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, his heavily ornamented torso twisting frontally from his position atop a horse as he impales a lion with a jewel-studded lance. Twenty-two of his sons and two attendants are scattered around him, each frozen at the peak of the action of their individual pursuits within a monumental oil painting composition of over eleven feet tall and seventeen feet wide (Fig. 1).[1] Horses sail through the air, their outstretched legs improbably caught off the ground in the heat of the hunt; the hair and beards of the figures are swept behind them in the fervor of their chase.

Figure 1. Attributed to Mihr ‘Ali, Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt with Twenty-two Sons, oil on canvas, c. 1810, Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi. In Persian Paintings in the India Office Library: A Descriptive Catalogue (Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1976).

This curious, animated painting is now affixed to the ceiling of India’s Rashtrapati Bhavan, but to those willing to crane their necks upwards to view it, the work and its surrounding program reveal crucial visual legacies connected to the painting’s circuitous journey from the Qajar court of 1810 to modern-day India.[2] Attributed to one of Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s principal court painters, Mihr ‘Ali, the painting would travel soon after its creation from the Qajar court to England via British ambassador Sir Gore Ouseley’s embassy in the early nineteenth century. It would then be moved from England to British India, and later still ushered into a modern Indian context within the aesthetic program of New Delhi’s Rashtrapati Bhavan. The work’s latent dynastic statement from its Qajar origins has accrued deep layers of reception and meaning over time as it has been physically and conceptually flipped to its present installment. The painting was propelled on its journey by a series of intentions, receptions, and reappropriations. Yet rather than obscuring the painting’s overall message, these layers offer a valuable study of reappropriated visual language in political messaging as it occurs variously in the domains of Qajar Iran, British India, and present-day India. The following analysis seeks to undertake this investigation through an exploration of the painting’s original contexts, its artistic reception in the Viceroy’s House (later Rashtrapati Bhavan), and finally its modern framing within a post-partition context.

The second ruler of the Qajar dynasty, Fath ‘Ali Shāh, in whose court the painting was created, governed with an exacting vanity visible in his and his court’s appearance and visual representations. His court practices and artistic commissions, ranging from rock relief narratives to life-size oil portraits, were carefully curated for audiences both domestic and abroad. The ostentatious ornamentation of his audience hall filled with marble and paintings in which ambassadors were received is specifically noted in travel reports, as is the sartorial splendor of inlaid rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and pearls decorating the ruler’s own body.[3] It was into this careful curation of an opulently powerful royal image that Fath ‘Ali Shah at the Hunt with Twenty-two Sons was born.

The self-aggrandizing subject matter of Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s painting—a ruler at the hunt with an array of his sons—was far from unique, and was particularly prevalent in the ruler’s court. As noted in B. W. Robinson’s seminal 1964 study of Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s court painters, this work stands as one of few extant examples of paintings on the three major themes of the court: enthronement, battle, and hunting.[4] Similarly, the theme of the second Qajar ruler hunting with his many progeny was a powerful encoding of dynastic messaging familiar to rock reliefs, manuscripts, wall paintings, caskets, and bookbindings in the first part of the nineteenth century.[5] The depiction of the ruler’s sons within this visual framework in Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt served a didactic purpose as a visualization of the strength of the dynastic genealogy—a web of direct descendants estimated to have amounted to 5,000 at the time of Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s death.[6] Yet the versified inscription further specifically identifies one of the pictured sons, ‘Ali Khan, as “the best fruit of the imperial tree.”[7] Not only is the visual force of the hunting scene motif powerfully paired with the arresting mass of sons in the aggregate, the personal detail of each figure lends greater weight to the picture’s propagandistic motives. The painting’s use of generalized themes as a framework for individualized focus creates an image of both overall unity and individual strength for the court.

While the topos of the dynastic hunting metaphor is well-established in Qajar visual propaganda, the painting diverges from tradition in its convergence of visual culture currents derived both domestically and from abroad. One can immediately note the infusion of Western-style landscape techniques in the attempt at Western perspective, the rendering of the trees and rocky outcroppings, and the atmospheric perspective of the blue-shift as the landscape progresses farther from the viewer. The Europeanizing medium of oil on canvas further adds to the work’s close relationship to Western artistic traditions, even as the painting retains the compressed dimensionality and saturation of Persian figural representation.

A multiplicity of pre-Islamic referents for the self-styling of Qajar rule, particularly under Fath ‘Ali Shāh, add most significantly to the eclecticism of the work. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw an interest in Sasanian revivalism,[8] and Qajar artworks such as this hunt scene were caught in the tension between their striving for the impregnability of a distinct identity on the one hand, and the preservation of the styles of their pictorial predecessors on the other hand. Fath ‘Ali Shāh is known to have reinvested in the creation of monumental narrative rock reliefs often depicting hunt or battle scenes in the style of those familiar to the Sasanians, circulating the message of dynastic authority to a wider public that would not otherwise witness either the programming of the Gulistan palace or the aesthetic styles of representation in portraits given as diplomatic gifts.[9] Sir Gore Ouseley reports from his embassy of such “sculptures and inscriptions to be found in Persia in tolerably good preservation, from 12 to 1500 years old, all appertaining to the Sassaman dynasty of Persian kings, cut on the native rock near Persepolis.”[10]

Qajar Shāhs connected themselves to the earlier Sasanians and other foundational rulers as a means of emphasizing continuity and legitimacy, a construction of visual identity seen clearly in Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt. Notably, the court accoutrements and ornamentation depicted in the painting visually recall much earlier displays. French historian Charles Texier observed parallels between the style of crowns worn by the Qajar shahs and featured prominently in their portraits during his travels, reporting the Kiyani crown seen in the hunt painting as “semblable à celle des rois de Persepolis.”[11]

Fath ‘Ali Shāh particularly propagated this Sasanian connection by way of his special interest in the Sasanian-inspired heroes of the Shāhnāma epic. The Shāh, himself a “tolerable poet” writing under the pseudonym Khāqān,[12] went so far as to gather a group of poets to create verses praising his rule in the style of the Shāhnāma. The subject matter of the hunt painting confirms his interest in linking himself to heroes of the Shāhnāma: In the visual portrayal of the Fath ‘Ali Shāh defeating the lion, one finds a resonance, for instance, with the heroes who often acquired power through the successful hunting of lions in the well-known epic.[13] Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s is the only lion at the hunt, and fittingly, the most formidable target for the most formidable defender of the realm, according to the painting’s propaganda. The painting, as Layla Diba notes, is also the singular remaining example of works with unprecedented and specially commissioned poetry inscriptions that highlight a continuation of Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s interest in self-elevation through poetry and visual arts and via traditionally sanctioned referents. Here, the inscriptions also obliquely refer to Persian defeats of Russian forces in a temporal grounding of the dynastic messaging to events at hand.

The work wields a strategic manipulation of space and proportion to amplify the subject matter’s context for the viewer. By far the largest pictorial space is afforded to the ruler, both in the cleared area in the landscape he and his horse inhabit as well as in his relative scale. Here the composition diverges from realism and the Western perspective applied in the landscape setting: The sons and animal figures surrounding the ruler are minimized as would be expected and as they recede along the tilted plane into the high-set horizon in the distance, while Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s proportions reject this precedent. Though the ruler is not the frontmost figure in the composition, he, his horse, and the lion he kills are enlarged such that they dwarf the surrounding figures and center the focus unequivocally on the ruler. This hierarchy of proportion serves both to emphasize Fath ‘Ali Shāh as an important central protector of the realm, and to draw attention to the number of sons surrounding him. While  [1] individualized, the sheer number of these sons as they squish as if in miniature to fill the space is a statement of force for the dynasty.

The apportioning of pictorial space further operates in much the same way as in the static portraits of the king and his sons. The approach of these portraits to pictorialization would have been familiar to select audiences domestically as well as abroad through the deployment of diplomatic gifts. A fruitful comparison can be found in the mural of Fath ‘Ali Shāh and twelve sons in Nigaristan (Fig. 2): The ruler sits centrally enthroned, ostentatiously adorned, framed by the triangular backing of the throne whose form carves out a wide segment of compositional space for him. His sons line the sides of the space, arranged in tidy registers and slightly angled inward to their father, with frontally rendered faces. The throne is seen to connect with the ground in the lower third segment of the image such that the ruler’s body is located at the center-most point of the composition, a microcosmic visualization of the ruler at the most commanding center of the dynasty.

Figure 2.  Photographer unknown, Mural of “Fath ‘Ali Shah and Twelve Sons, c. nineteenth century, salt print, Brooklyn Museum, New York City. In Diba, “An Encounter between Qajar Iran and the West.”

The hunting scene at hand does not stray far from this tradition. Despite the painting’s conceit of the tumult of the hunt, the regimented arrangement of surrounding sons can still be read—albeit less clearly—in the two diagonal lines along which they are positioned behind the ruler. Even the expectedly entropic scene of a hunt conforms to the dynastic order in relation to the ruler’s presence. The decorated horse here replaces the decorated throne of the Nigaristan mural, still defending a swath of the arrangement for occupation only by Fath ‘Ali Shāh. The combination of the Westernized landscape mode employed in the spatial recession toward the horizon and the tapering of the loose lines of the sons also echoes the triangular space afforded to the king by the throne in the mural scene. The surrounding sons also often partially overlap one another in slightly awkward, flattened arrangements as in the standard court portraits—though still none dare infringe on Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s pictorial space, his figure being the most worthy of unobstructed study within the court context of the painting’s creation. The carefully constructed arrangement of space around the ruler captured in the painting echoes contemporary court practices as observed by Sir Ouseley’s 1810 embassy:

“There is one part of the hall of audience where no man can sit, because it is the seat of the king, the prince is obliged to place himself in the opposite corner; that therefore the ambassador could not be placed upon the same Musnud as his royal highness, because he would be seated too near his person, and that would be out of all bounds of proper etiquette and respect.”[14]

Further, while each figure and his horse are captured at the height of a gallop or frozen at the pregnant moment before the release of an arrow or plunge of a spear, they are contorted mid-action such that their faces are studied frontally as in the posed portraits. The viewer is thus granted full distinguishing sight of each figure’s features, which seem caught and collapsed on the plane as if mounted for inspection on a microscope slide.

In the painting’s visual translation of the rigidly ordered portraits and practices known to the Qajar court into the separate but familiar trope of the hunt, Fath ‘Ali Shāh is portrayed as a doubly powerful wellspring of order and dynastic strength. By consolidating multiple recognizable visual metaphors in a single composition, the painting served a potent propagandizing purpose for its domestic viewers before embarking on a separate life abroad. For this reason, the painting was likely commissioned initially for a domestic audience in Qajar Iran to whom its conglomerate of metaphors would be familiar. And in fact, a similar, if not the very same, hunting scene was packed away for its journey to England only after it had been exhibited locally.[15]

Also persuasive of this nature of commission is Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s public perception during his reign. J. S. Buckingham wrote of his observations of the Qajar court in 1829 that its ruler was “cruel and avaricious” and whose subjects “inveigh both against his boundless avarice, his oppressive government, the corruption of his inferior agents, and his own personal cowardice.”[16] The theme of unity and triumph over foes would then be particularly applicable as a curated visual image directed initially at internal audiences liable to cast aspersions on Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s rule. Moreover, the ruler’s domain had been worn by the strife of competing groups since the 1722 demise of the Safavids, especially at the tail end of the Russo-Persian conflict.[17]As such, unity and a sense of victory in the form of battle would have been an especially pertinent statement for a domestic viewership. Within this milieu, the political messaging of Fath Ali Shāh at the Hunt with Twenty-two Sons was realized—a communication which would have been received largely without distortion for only a few short years before its journey of misreadings and reinterpretation in the context of British India.

From the above context of Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s court that was integral to the painting’s composition and reception, Robinson suggests that the work began the next stage of its life and interpretation en route to England as a diplomatic gift to the Prince Regent on the return of Sir Ouseley’s trip in 1814. However, it was recorded in 1924 in the holdings of the India Office in London rather than the royal collections[18]—a signal that it was regarded not as a gift from ruler to ruler, but rather as a generalized example of “oriental” art connected to the East India Company. As such, its intended statement of dynastic power had been instead classified along Orientalist lines and reappropriated as a testament to British colonial hegemony as a decoration on the walls of the India Office.

In 1914, the painting was hung in a first-floor corridor outside the military committee room, where it came to appear as though in decorative service of British rule along with the likenesses of British generals and lords accompanying the work in the same hall.[19] Later, in 1924, William Foster records with a brief description of the painting that it hung still in a poorly lit corridor—then surrounded by Chinese landscapes. Though its whereabouts are hazy for a brief period, it was selected along with four of these landscapes for the program of the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi as part of a decoration project that lasted from the 1920s through the 1930s under two successive viceroys.[20]

Figure 3. William Walcott, Impression of the State Ballroom, watercolour, 1913. In Partha Mitter et. al, The Arts and Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond (Publications Division, Government of India, 2016).

The British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, responsible for the architectural formation of the residence (and the new imperial city too), was intent on preserving the elemental neo-classicizing forms of the building through this project. A 1913 rendering of the original plan for the ceiling of the State Ballroom reveals his idea of a simple, compass-like form spanning the space within his signature geometry (Fig. 3). What Lutyens had not counted on in his vision for the ballroom space, however, was the formidable character of Lady Marie Willingdon, wife of Lord Willingdon, the second viceroy to oversee the decoration project. Despite Lutyens’s protests, she envisaged the ballroom as a more animated, extravagant space, and not only selected the Fath ‘Ali Shāh painting for its ceiling, but coordinated the design of a new surrounding program anathema to Lutyens’s wish to preserve the ceiling’s expansive, simplified forms (see Fig. 4).[21]

Figure 4. Ashoka Hall today, Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi. In Persian Paintings in the India Office Library.

As vicereine, the responsibility of managing and curating the tone of the viceregal space fell to Lady Willingdon. Her priorities in this matter extended far beyond the adornment of the physical structure: she focused much of her energy on revising the cultural interactions and expectations in the space to elevate the visual impression of the viceroyalty, not dissimilar to the court practices both informing and informed by the court paintings of Fath ‘Ali Shāh. Her reforms included increasing the formality of expected attire and pomp and circumstance at events and reinvigorating the glamor of the court through opulent balls, elaborate receptions, and extravagant parties.[22] The installed painting and its new accompanying program quickly became a centerpiece and metonym of Lady Willingdon’s social court and Lord Willingdon’s viceroy tenure within this context in perhaps the most public space of the residence.

An art historian and decorator from Italy trained in “oriental” art in the United States, Tomasso Colonello, and a team of twelve Indian calligraphers and designers were responsible for the decorative program under Marie Willingdon,[23] which presents an orientalized interpretation of the grafted work in service of colonial power. Interestingly, Colonello’s 1933 design follows the original painting’s lead in looking to the iconography of the Persian past. Four narratives of hunt scenes whose protagonists are historical rulers like Bahram Gur filling the oval shape and the surrounding interstitial animal combat motifs are constructed in a distinct, seventeenth-century Indo-Persianate revival style within a carpet-like design (Fig. 5).[24] Mughal architectural forms are seen in a procession narrative weaving along the top of the arches and columns.

Figure 5. Tomasso Colonnello, Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt with Twenty-two Sons and surrounding program, oil on canvas, 1933. In Persian Paintings in the India Office Library.

This program’s completion is the third major moment of reappropriation in the central painting’s lifespan, offering a glimpse into the way in which its already hybridized visual language was translated in a new context. In contrast to the way in which the distinctness of each historical pictorial language strengthens the intended message of the central Qajar hunt picture, the motley of visual traditions brought to bear in the ceiling program is read and valued as a genericized whole. Even the repositioning of the painting to the ceiling reinterprets the piece as a distanced European imagination of Persia: The painting originally and in the Iranian context co-opted the familiar format of Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s life-sized portraits in the hunting scene, meaning that the viewer could admire the ruler’s striking presence in the painting in direct relation to their own body. Conversely, the painting’s new placement on the ceiling dissolves the potential for this relational significance in its depiction of Fath ‘Ali Shāh as ballroom visitors strain to look upwards at the ruler affixed high over their heads. The reduction to and framing of the Qajar court work as a distanced Indo-Persian fantasy evokes the Persianate culture of Muslim India, thereby subtly arguing for the justification of the cultural imperialism of the Raj directly from the state’s entertainment hub.

The State Ballroom was indeed the main entertaining room at the time the painting and its framing program were installed in the Viceroy’s House, the construction of which was itself a form of visual consolidation of British rule in India along with the move of the capital from Calcutta to a site close to the former Mughal capital in Delhi. Happily for Lady Willingdon’s vision of frequent lavish balls and consequentially for the transformed messaging of the painting, the ballroom home of Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt was the residence’s primary and largest space for efficiently conveying the visual ideals of the viceroy and British rule in India to those friendly enough with the regime to be invited. The new ceiling decoration was very much in line with the tradition of oriental influences in the decoration of such social spaces of leisure, its original dynastic statement falling to its generic oriental classification in British India’s social communication patterns. The painting had become an imperial trophy defining the space, its original incorporation of multiple visual traditions flattened and recycled for the colonial power at the cost of its own.

While this installation on the ceiling of the hall was Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt’s last physical shift in its journey, it must be briefly noted that it gained an additional modern meaning as the contexts of its surrounding structures changed. After Partition and the dissolution of the British Raj, the State Ballroom was renamed Ashok Hall and the Viceroy’s residence turned over to house the President of India—now known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan. As the symbolic and physical space of the residence was reappropriated for an independent India, so was the context of the painting for a final time: Two plaques referencing the Ashoka Pillar have been added to the surrounding program of the hunt scene above entrances. The room now reads as a nested doll scheme of repurposed layers of the painting’s contexts. Working inwards and upwards, one sees first the modern visual language of independent India in the Indian national emblem, then the added program from British Indian rule, and finally, the central scene still carrying its long-since distorted dynastic message.

From its inception to its present incarnation on the ceiling of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt with Twenty-two Sons is a pastiche of styles, significances, and reappropriations of visual meaning. This work and its story, while tempting to confine to a sequence of misreadings and false interpretations, offer generative insight into the tug-of-war between intention and reception in the Qajar court, in British India, and in modern independent India. Both the accidental misinterpretations and the deliberate reappropriations the painting endured and inspired along its journey to the Ashok Hall ceiling create in the work a productive and compact reference guide for the visual language spoken at each stop on its journey. Its vivid threads of visual cultures are woven in complex patterns of reception and power dynamics, a political textile with much to tell of its weavers

Endnotes

[1] B. W. Robinson, “The Court Painters of Fath ‘ali Shāh,” Eretz-Israel: Archeological, Historical and Geographical Studies (1964): 98.

[2] Layla S. Diba, “An Encounter between Qajar Iran and the West: The Rashtrapati Bhavan Painting of Fath ’Ali Shah at the Hunt,” in Islamic Art in the 19th Century: Tradition, Innovation, and Eclecticism (Brill, 2006), 285.

[3] James Justinian Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, between the Years 1810 and 1816 (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 196, 389.

[4] Robinson, 97.

[5] Diba, 285.

[6] Robinson, 95.

[7] Diba, 284.

[8] Jennifer M. Scarce, “Ancestral Themes in the Art of Qajar Iran,” in Islamic Art in the 19th Century, 238.

[9] Scarce, 237.

[10] Gore Ouseley, “Some Particulars Respecting the Present State of Persia. Communicated in a Letter to the Hon. Colonel Greville Howard. By Sir Gore Ouseley,” The Philosophical Magazine XLII (December 1813): 423-424.

[11] Charles Texier, Description de l’Arménie, la Perse et la Mésopotamie (Typographie de Firmin Didot frères, 1842), 126.

[12] Edward Scott Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz, by the Route of Kazroon and Feerozabad (W. Bulmer and Co., 1805), 97.

[13] Diba, 288.

[14] Morier, 196.

[15] Robinson, 99.

[16] James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia (H. Colburn, 1830).

[17] Kevin Gledhill, “The Caspian State: Regional Autonomy, International Trade, and the Rise of Qājār Iran, 1722 – 1797,” PhD diss. (Yale University, 2020), 5.

[18] Diba, 290.

[19] William Foster, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Paintings, Statues, Etc. in the India Office (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1914), 33.

[20] Diba, 290.

[21] Diba, 292.

[22] Penny Beaumont, Imperial Divas: The Vicerines of India (Haus Publishing, 2010), 77.

[23] Diba, 292.

[24] Diba, 293.