The empress Nur Jahan, Jahangir’s favorite wife, exercised influence in affairs of state. By all accounts, including those of Jahangir himself and European visitors to the Mughal court, she was a remarkable and brilliantly capable woman. This painting may have been made shortly after the death of Jahangir. He appears aged in his portrait, and it echoes a similar composition from another painting in which Jahangir holds a painted portrait of his deceased father, Akbar.