Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c11.13

c11.13

The interest of European artists in Indian painting may be said to have begun with Albrecht Dürer. According to an entry in this master’s diary he was presented through some Portuguese East Indian traders with ‘a child’s head (painted) on linen, and a wooden weapon from Calicut’.¹ These articles must have had some merit in their owner’s eyes, otherwise they would have passed unrecorded in a day-book confined only to events of note. Western painters were, in Dürer’s time, becoming acquainted with the arts of India, and at one period were fond of introducing into the backgrounds of their pictures objects from that country, such as draperies and carpets; but the first great master to become actually acquainted with the miniatures of the Mughals was Rembrandt. The Dutch artist’s appreciation of the Eastern painter’s genius was of a very practical order. Having acquired a number of Indian miniatures of the early seventeenth century, he proceeded to make careful copies of them in sepia line and wash, on Japanese paper, in his own inimitable style. These drawings, made about the year 1656, of portraits of Jahangir and other Mughal personages, now preserved in the British Museum, are an interesting commentary by the great painter on the art of his brother craftsmen in the East.¹ About the same time examples of Indian miniatures were beginning to arrive in England. Through Edward Pococke, an eminent oriental scholar of the seventeenth century, who lived for some years in Aleppo, Archbishop Laud obtained those which he subsequently deposited in the Bodleian Library. At a later date a Mr. Richard Johnson, who was Warren Hastings’s banker, and resided for some time in Lucknow and Hyderabad, acquired the sixty-seven muraqqa‘s now in the Library of the India Office. The Elliott collection in the Bodleian Library was obtained by an Indian official of that name, an ardent oriental bibliophile, whose service was spent mainly at Patna in Bihar. Others, such as Hay and Ouseley, acquired miniatures and manuscripts from India and the East, which have found homes in England. On the Continent similar collections, both public and private, have been obtained in a like manner. Of those in England, as early as the year 1777 the series at the British Museum was attracting the attention of artists, for in July of that year Sir Joshua Reynolds records his admiration of some of the pictures there, specially signifying six in the famous muraqqa‘ No. 18801. Since then, with occasional interludes of neglect, Indian miniatures have received their meed of estimation from artists, connoisseurs, and students of oriental learning, while at the present time the prospect of their attaining a fairly high place in the sphere of pictorial art seems assured.