Yael Riceさんのイラストまとめ

And in this depiction of Hanuman fetching the magical herb from Mt Meru to cure Rama and Lakshmana, the artist shows the fallen protagonists secured to the herb-bearing mountain chunk with Hanuman's tail

The same manuscript contains bios and portraits of shaykhs, poets, and others who were active in and around Lucknow and Faizabad, including this guy, who may be the Urdu poet Imam Bakhsh Nasikh

My new favorite painting, by the world-renowned MAGA artist Goya

Which brings us full circle (I think?). I still don't know why/where the Mead painting was made nor by/for whom, but I can say that through some twist of fate, a London collector came to acquire it, & for some amount of time it lived with Rembrandt's drawing of a Mughal noble.

But guess what else he monogrammed? Well, Esdaile was a big collector of Rembrandt prints and drawings. So, you'll find W.E. on the Mead Mughal painting, but also on this drawing that Rembrandt made c. 1654-6 (Morgan Library) AFTER a Mughal painting!

@docstobar @BLAsia_Africa Hard to say whether it was a representational convention or something more, but its appearance is widespread. In this scene from a 1597-8 AD Mughal ms of Amir Khusraw's Khamsa made for Akbar (@MedievalMss, W.624), the same visual trope was used.

"A bird resembling a duck," 5th degree of Cancer, from an astrological ms. in the Raza Library, Rampur #MughalMonday