Prince Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb was born Muhi al-Din Muhammad on 3 November 1618 in Dahod, in present-day Gujarat, the third son of the future emperor Shah Jahan. After his father's accession in 1628, he received a court education at Agra Fort under private tutors, memorizing the Qur'an and studying Islamic law, Arabic, Persian, statecraft, and military tactics. He was also trained in calligraphy by Syed Ali Tabrizi and became a capable practitioner of the naskh script. As a prince he served as viceroy of the Deccan under his father, the period reflected in early portraits that museums catalogue as "Prince Aurangzeb."

He took the throne in 1658 under the regnal title Alamgir and ruled until his death, one of the longest reigns of any Mughal emperor. Compared with his predecessors Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, he is generally described by historians as reducing imperial patronage of figurative court painting, even as regional ateliers continued to produce portraits and manuscript illustrations of him. He died on 3 March 1707 in a military encampment near Ahmednagar, in the Deccan region of present-day Maharashtra, and was buried at Khuldabad, near Aurangabad.

Art-historical writing on Aurangzeb treats him primarily as a ruler and patron rather than as a painter. The recurring scholarly point is that his reign marked a relative contraction in imperial commissioning of figurative miniature painting after the high patronage of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, even though portraits and manuscript illustrations of him continued to be produced in Mughal and provincial ateliers. No exhibitions of Prince Aurangzeb as a practicing artist, and no exact, attributable critic quotations about him in that capacity, could be located in current sources.

There is no verified auction record for an artist named Prince Aurangzeb. Lots that carry his name at auction are Mughal or later school paintings that depict him as subject, attributed to unknown or regional court painters rather than to him. Examples include a Bonhams group composition of the four Mughal emperors that sold for GBP 50,000 including premium, a Dominic Winter Mughal-school portrait of him that sold for GBP 18,000, and a twentieth-century Delhi School painting titled "The Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb as a prince, spearing a raging elephant before his father," which sold for USD 11,500. In each case the artist field is unknown or a school attribution, and Aurangzeb is the sitter.

Anyone encountering the name Prince Aurangzeb in a sale catalogue or museum record should treat it as a subject identification, not an artist attribution, since no catalogue raisonne, certificate program, or personal oeuvre exists for him. Auction houses and museums typically catalogue these works to an anonymous Mughal, Deccan, or later school, and comparable institutional holdings, such as the Metropolitan Museum's related Aurangzeb portraits, are useful benchmarks for checking a given lot's attribution and dating. Because the market activity involves anonymous or school-attributed paintings rather than a named artist's body of work, price comparisons should be made lot by lot rather than assumed to trace a single artist's market.