Cavalcade du Grand Seigneur / La Fête du Poids au Mogol [Set of 2]
1727
Two copper-plate engravings on laid paper
Print size: 12.5 x 16.25 in (32 x 41.5 cm)
Sheet size: 14.5 x 17.75 in (37 x 45 cm)
Folded: 14.5 x 9 in (37 x 23 cm)
Two iconic early-eighteenth-century engravings by Bernard Picart — master printmaker of the Enlightenment — depicting Mughal ceremonial splendour through the lens of European curiosity, spectacle and ethnographic imagination
Published in 1727, Bernard Picart’s monumental illustrated corpus on global religions and ceremonies was issued across Amsterdam, Paris, and The Hague.
These two engravings, Cavalcade du Grand Seigneur and La Fête du Poids au Mogol, belong to the vast iconographic universe created by Picart, whose celebrated compendium Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–1737) remains one of the Enlightenment’s most ambitious visual attempts to comprehend global cultural and religious practice.
Picart (1673–1733), trained in Paris and active in Amsterdam, was regarded as one of the greatest engravers of his generation. His work circulated widely among scholars, diplomats, and collectors, shaping European visual knowledge of Asian, Islamic, African, and American societies. His ethnographic approach—unusually empirical for its time—fused observed detail with a refined classical aesthetic, rendering his plates simultaneously documentary and theatrical.
These two plates exemplify that duality.
Cavalcade du Grand Seigneur presents a ceremonial procession associated with the Mughal court, showing nobles mounted on richly caparisoned horses, accompanied by retainers carrying insignia of office. The composition emphasizes the hierarchical order and ritualized movement characteristic of Mughal public spectacle, where courtly rank was made visible through costume, distance, gesture, and the controlled choreography of retinues.
La Fête du Poids au Mogol illustrates the famous annual ceremony in which the Mughal emperor—most famously Akbar and Jahangir—was weighed against gold, silver, or grain, the equivalent value of which was then distributed in charity. He depicts the celebrated imperial weighing ceremony, known in Mughal practice as Tuladan or Majlis-i-Wazn—a twice-yearly rite held on the emperor’s solar and lunar birthdays. Rooted in Turko-Mongol court tradition and integrated with Indian ritual frameworks, the emperor was weighed against gold, silver, grain, and other commodities, the equivalent value then distributed in charity. Picart renders the event as a lavish theatre of power and auspiciousness, surrounded by courtiers, musicians, religious figures, and petitioners, evoking the immense ceremonial display—jewels, elephants, fireworks—that contemporaries associated with Mughal magnificence.
Although Picart relied partly on earlier travel accounts and Indian drawings circulating in Europe, he interpreted them through a distinctly Enlightenment sensibility: balanced composition, clarity of gesture, and an interest in the universality of ritual behaviour. The Mughal court thus enters the European imagination not merely as a site of luxury and exotica, but as a civilisation with coherent ceremonial structures, moral philosophy, and political theology.
These engravings occupy an important place in the history of Mughal representation, standing among the earliest widely disseminated European images of Indian sovereign ceremony and anticipating later Orientalist and ethnographic traditions.
(Set of two)
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