page_title: Abd al-Samad
section_title: Samad
hierarchical_section_title: Abd al-Samad / Samad
context_page_description: 'Abd al-Samad or Khwaja Abdus Samad was a 16th-century painter of Persian miniatures who moved to the Mughal Empire in South Asia and became one of the founding masters of the Mughal miniature tradition, and later the holder of a number of senior administrative roles. Samad's career under the Mughals, from about 1550 to 1595, is relatively well documented, and a number of paintings are attributed to him from this period. From about 1572 he headed the imperial workshop of the Emperor Akbar and "it was under his guidance that Mughal style came to maturity". It has recently been contended by a leading specialist, Barbara Brend, that Samad is the same person as Mirza Ali, a Persian artist whose documented career seems to end at the same time as Abd al-Samad appears working for the Mughals.
context_section_description: One source says that Samad's father was the vizier of Shah Shuja of Shiraz, a difficulty with her theory that Brend explains by speculating that this was instead his grandfather, in whose house he was brought up while Sultan Muhammed established his career at court. According to Mughal records, Samad became a master in the court workshop of Shah Tahmasp I of Persia.  He was also a calligrapher, something not mentioned in connection with Mirza Ali.  No works are generally attributed to him before about 1544–45, although Welch attributes a miniature in the much earlier Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh to him.  Brend finds this painting "unsatisfactory" and the work of an inexperienced painter.
  Samad first met the exiled Mughal emperor Humayun in Tabriz in 1544. In 1546 Humayun asked Tahmasp to release Samad and his fellow Persian Mir Sayyid Ali from his service so that he could engage them, and in about 1549, they arrived at Humayun's temporary capital in Kabul, where Samad was engaged by Humayun to teach his son Akbar, and possibly the emperor himself, how to draw. With Mir Sayyid Ali and Dust Muhammad, another Persian, Samad "introduced a fully imperial Persian style into the Mughal ateliers", which seem previously to have been small and consisting of artists trained in various centres including Bukhara. Samad probably worked on the unusually large painting of the Princes of the House of Timur (British Museum), which Humayun commissioned about 1550–55, in particular on the landscape background. In 1552 a group of single miniatures including work by the two Persians was included in a diplomatic gift to the ruler of Kashgar, as Humayun worked to assemble support to regain his throne. Some of his works from this period are in a muraqqa or album in the library of the Golestan Palace in Tehran (MSS 1663–4), still showing a thoroughly Safavid style. One of these miniatures depicts Akbar giving a miniature painting to his father Humayun, and includes Samad's name on a portfolio; the figure next to it is probably his portrait.  The image both uses a fully Persian style, and includes thematic elements, including the self-portrait, that are "dazzling new departures in Islamic painting"
  Samad and Mir Sayyid Ali followed the emperor on his return to India, only seven months before he died in 1556.  They were retained by the fourteen-year-old Akbar who within a few years set about greatly expanding his court workshop. A drawing with muted colour, inscribed with Samad's name, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford depicts the arrest, three days after Akbar's accession, of Humayun's troublesome favourite, Abdu'l Ma'ali, who is seized from behind by a burly courtier. Both artists probably worked on the Tutinama, the first major commission completed in the new reign, where the disparate styles of the several artists used remain clear.  But Mir Sayyid Ali was initially given the supervision of Akbar's huge commission of the 1400 large illustrations for the Hamzanama, which was to be fourteen years in the making.
  In about 1572 Samad replaced Mir Sayyid Ali (who returned to Persia) as head of the imperial workshop, probably because under Sayyid the progress of the illustrations for the Hamzanama was too slow.  At this point the commission was seven years old and only four of the volumes were complete.  Under Samad's direction the remaining ten volumes were completed in another seven years.  It is uncertain whether Samad painted any of them himself, but "the direction of Mughal painting increasingly came to follow the aims pursued by ‛Abd al-Samad. It is likely that the increased central control that became evident by the Lahore period [1580s on] can be attributed to this artist". Among the mostly Hindu artists trained by Samad were Daswanth and Basavan, who went on to become famous Mughal painters.
  Despite his role in forging the new Mughal synthesis of Persian and Indian styles, Samad's own works remain conservative, with a great interest in detail, and rather less in the new style of dramatic narrative and realism favoured by the young Akbar.  But by th
caption: Abd al-Samad, miniature of 1588
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