Mounted Hunter with Dog Pursuing Game Birds

The tiny holes around the figure of this hunter chasing game birds indicate that this sketch was used as a pounce, to copy the image onto another work. In Islamic paintings, stock figures that filled court or battle scenes or natural elements that elaborated landscape backgrounds were often copied into a number of compositions from preexisting sketches such as this. Holes were pricked around the image to be copied and transferred onto an underlying paper by dusting charcoal over it.