In the fading glow of Mughal rule, long after the empire had lost its political strength, there persisted a final, stubborn circle of artists who refused to let its artistic lineage disappear. At the center of this dwindling world was Ghulam Ali Khan, a painter who proudly called himself “His Majesty’s Painter” even when the emperor could scarcely afford a stable court. His art, produced in Delhi during the early nineteenth century, became the last significant expression of Mughal visual culture. Yet today, he is one of the most overlooked figures in Indian art history—an artist who captured an empire’s last breaths without securing his own immortality.
Ghulam Ali Khan was born into a family that had served the Mughal throne for generations. Earlier members of his lineage, like the refined Ghulam Murtaza Khan, still painted in the grave, polished idiom of Shah Jahan’s era, while others, such as Faiz Ali Khan, provided group portraits and architectural views for the British Resident Thomas Metcalfe. A close relative, Mazhar Ali Khan, would go on to produce the extraordinary Delhi panoramas that survive as some of the most detailed visual documents of the city before its devastation in 1857. This entire family formed what was effectively the last Mughal atelier, continuing a sophisticated artistic tradition under increasingly difficult circumstances.
By the time Ghulam Ali Khan began working, the imperial court could no longer offer consistent patronage. Instead, he moved between employers, producing paintings for Mughal royalty when possible but relying heavily on commissions from Delhi’s nobility and British officials. The Nawab of Jhajjar, regional rulers around Delhi, and especially ambitious British patrons such as William Fraser and James Skinner all turned to him to record the world around them. In doing so, Ghulam Ali Khan found himself positioned between two cultures—Mughal in training, yet serving patrons who wanted their own hybrid visions of India rendered with precision.
Fraser’s interest in ethnographic detail brought out a new dimension in Khan’s work. Under his guidance, the painter produced lively and intimate portrayals of figures from Delhi’s social landscape—traders, musicians, craftsmen—studies that later formed part of the celebrated Fraser Album. Skinner, meanwhile, demanded something more monumental. Khan painted enormous compositions for him, including the imposing scene of Skinner presiding over his regiment in 1827, a composition that arranges the cavalry like a formal Mughal darbar even though its subjects wear British-era military uniforms. Another immense work from 1828, showing Skinner and Fraser entering the Hansi cantonment, spreads across the paper like a cinematic panorama, with rows of horsemen, banners, and scattered vignettes of military exercises.
At times, traces of the painter’s personal world appear unexpectedly. In one folio produced for Skinner’s album of occupational types, a bespectacled artist is shown seated among pigments and brushes in a quiet Mughal interior, an album resting on his raised knee as he paints. Whether this is Ghulam Ali Khan himself or another atelier member is unknown, but the picture offers a rare glimpse into the environment in which such works were produced—an echo of the Mughal studio tradition in a period when the empire itself was barely standing.
Even as his attention was drawn to military and social subjects, the landscape of Delhi remained central to the atelier’s work. Mazhar Ali Khan’s nearly 360-degree view of the city from the Lahore Gate, completed in 1846, captured everything from the domes of the Jama Masjid to the newest colonial buildings rising beyond the walls. Many of these structures would vanish after 1857, when large sections of the city were demolished in retribution for the uprising. In this context, the panoramas and architectural studies painted by the family acquire enormous historical significance—they document, with remarkable clarity, a city on the brink of irreversible transformation. Their quieter works, such as a tranquil depiction of the dargah at Nizamuddin, show a Delhi where spiritual life endured even amid political decay.
Despite his versatility and innovation, Ghulam Ali Khan slowly slipped from public memory. The dispersal of albums into private British collections severed the connection between the artist and his city. Colonial art histories often overlooked Indian painters who did not conform neatly to European categories, and the hybrid nature of Khan’s style—neither purely Mughal nor wholly Western—left him outside the narratives that came to dominate later scholarship. The destruction of Delhi after the mutiny erased much of the physical world his paintings depicted, further distancing modern viewers from the context in which he worked.
Yet his importance is unmistakable. Ghulam Ali Khan witnessed the final decades of Mughal sovereignty and preserved its last visual language at a moment when the empire could no longer preserve itself. He recorded the social fabric of Delhi, the ambitions of British officers, and the architectural face of a city about to be reshaped by violence and colonial reconstruction. His paintings offer one of the last coherent views of Mughal Delhi—its ceremonies, its landscapes, and its people—rendered with the precision of a court artist and the observational clarity demanded by his new patrons.
Though history has largely forgotten his name, the art of Ghulam Ali Khan endures as the final testament of the Mughal atelier tradition. In his images, the old Delhi lives again: luminous, fragile, and on the edge of disappearance.
