Mughal emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan with their ministers, by Bichitr (recto), foliate design in gold (verso), folio from the Minto Album

Mughal emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan with their ministers, by Bichitr (recto), foliate design in gold (verso), folio from the Minto Album. This allegorical group portrait outlines the importance of succession to the emperor Shah Jahan (seated on the right). Three Mughal generations are seated under a canopy: Akbar (r. 1555-1605) in the centre, his son Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) on the left, and Jahangir's son Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58) on the right. Akbar hands a jewelled crown not to his actual successor Jahangir, but to his grandson Shah Jahan: this anachronism underlines the current ruler's dynastic legitimacy. Before the thrones stand the three rulers' respective chief ministers: from left to right I‘timaduddawla (d. 1622, served Jahangir), Mirza `Aziz Koka Khan-i A'zam (d. 1624, served Akbar), and Abu'l-Hasan Asaf Khan (d. 1641, served Shah Jahan). All six figures are identified by inscriptions, and the artist has signed Shah Jahan's footstool. A second painting (V&A IM.8-1925), designed as the matching pendant to this one, also maps out the ancestral Mughal line: the Central Asian conqueror Timur (d. 1405) sits in the centre, handing a crown to the first Mughal emperor Babur (d. 1530), watched by Babur's son Humayun (d. 1556), and their three chief ministers. The Beatty folio has no mounted artwork on the reverse, which strongly suggests that it was either the first or the final folio in the original Mughal album. The "Minto Album" refers to a set of forty album pages, now in the collections of the Chester Beatty and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). Together with two other known sets of album pages (the "Wantage Album" also in the V&A, and the "Kevorkian Album" in the Metropolitan Museum (New York) and the Freer-Sackler Museum (Washington, DC)), these dispersed folios were originally part of several imperial Mughal Indian albums, owned by Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) and his son Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658). The exact reconstruction (and even the number) of those original court albums is much complicated by later reformatting of the folios and their contents, rearranged into new groups, and with works re-set among later additions in new albums. As a broad group, these Mughal albums represent an extraordinary art collection: contemporary portraits of rulers, officials, soldiers and holy men, private scenes of palace life, and animal studies, contrasted with a more consistent series of older Persian calligraphic works by the renowned Mir `Ali Haravi (d. 1544), re-framed in new Mughal surroundings. His large, signed "exhibition piece" calligraphy lines were produced as standalone quotations; much smaller lines of calligraphy were cut from small-format "safina" books of poetry, and arranged as border elements throughout the albums. The works were also planned in pairs, to face one another on a page-opening, in a carefully curated layout. Images faced images, and calligraphy faced calligraphy. Both rulers added their notes and commentary to many of the images, identifying painters or commenting on the sitter of a portrait. Most dramatically, all of these works on paper are mounted in decorated album pages, which follow distinct design programmes throughout the albums. Informed by European botanical print illustrations, these may depict flowering plant specimens and flying insects, painted in gold against dark blue or cream backgrounds, or in bright colour, gold-outlined against cream paper. More stylised border designs drawing from Iran organise leafy floral stems in spiralling scrollwork, ordered trellis or pinned among palmette strapwork and lobed medallions, against cream or dark blue grounds. These different border modes are dateable, as they follow shifts in Mughal taste under Jahangir (for the gold-painted plants on deep blue or cream), and Shah Jahan (for the orderly colourful plants on cream ground). Visually, these borders hold the album sequence together, with their designs of great vivacity. Folio, ink, colours and gold on paper, mounted on album page with gold-outlined floral borders, emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan with their ministers Khan A`zam, I`timaduddawla and Asaf Khan, inscribed Bichitr (recto), foliate design in gold (verso), either the first or the final page of the Minto Album, painting Agra, dated year 3 of Shah Jahan's reign, 1630-31, album page Agra, India, c. 1630-40.