c. 1685

The Piebald Stallion Sadaji and His Groom

Horses were essential to court life for both transportation and war, so a king's best horses were often memorialized in paintings. It is not surprising that this stallion, identified as Sadaji in an inscription on the reverse, dominates the painting and dwarfs the groom beside him. The artist here employed hieratic scale, an artistic device common to portraits of the royal court, in order to stress the horse's preeminence over the groom. Artists freely and frequently portrayed favored animals of the court.