Prince Mirza Babur

Prince Mirza Babur, also recorded as Shahzada Mirza Muhammad Babur Bahadur Baig, was born in 1796, a son of the Mughal emperor Akbar II, who reigned from 1806 to 1837. He died on 13 February 1835, at about age thirty-eight. No school, tutor, or formal training record survives for him, and no source treats him as a practicing painter or craftsman.

The one artwork that carries his name in museum records is a watercolor cataloged as "The Bullock-Drawn Carriage of Prince Mirza Babur," from the so-called Fraser Album, a group of Company School paintings made in Delhi around 1815 to 1819 for the British official William Fraser. Museum and auction-house cataloguing attributes such Fraser Album sheets to Delhi-school painters working in the circle of Ghulam Ali Khan and his family, not to the prince. In this painting, as in the broader album, Prince Mirza Babur is the subject portrayed, not the artist who painted him.

That watercolor passed through a private collection, then Sotheby's on 7 July 1980 (lot 2), then Christie's on 7 October 2009 (lot 138), before entering the permanent collection of the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, where it remains today.

No named art critic in a major outlet has published an assessment of Prince Mirza Babur as an artist, and no such assessment appears to exist, because he did not practice as one. Scholarly and museum commentary on the Fraser Album, including entries from the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and auction-house lot notes, discusses the album's painters, chiefly Ghulam Ali Khan and his relatives, and treats its many princely and courtly sitters, including Prince Mirza Babur, as historical subjects of a documentary style of Company School portraiture.

There is no confirmed auction record, gallery representation, or catalogue raisonne for Prince Mirza Babur as an artist, and no evidence that one has ever existed. Secondary market commentary references a £450,000 Sotheby's sale of a work titled "Portrait of Babur," but available sources do not confirm an exact sale date or confirm which historical Babur the portrait depicts, so that price should not be attributed to this prince. The only market-relevant object connected to Prince Mirza Babur is the Fraser Album watercolor described above, and its market attribution runs to the Delhi-school Fraser Album painters, not to him.

There is no artist market to evaluate here. Anyone offering a "work by Prince Mirza Babur" for sale is very likely describing a Company School or Fraser Album painting in which he appears as the sitter, not the maker, and any such offer should be checked directly against the Fraser Album provenance chain and the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia's published catalogue record. Collectors should also take care not to conflate this prince, who died in 1835, with the earlier Mughal emperor Babur, 1483 to 1530, whose manuscripts and portraits do have an active, well-documented auction market under his own name.