Guru Har Rai

Depicted here in profile as a haloed young man with a black beard and a staff in his right hand, Har Rai walks aloofly under a large parasol held by a servant. A tree is in bloom and a white dog looks over its shoulder ahead of the guru.


Portraiture emerged during the Mughal Empire in the early seventeenth century and spread through South Asia for various aesthetic, social and political reasons. Whether conventional representations or individual likenesses, gouache portraits like this one became important vehicles with which to memorialize and canonize the lineage of the gurus as both historical figures and devotional icons.