Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c11.17.2

c11.17.2

The history of some of these pictures, especially of the older and better ones, since the gradual breaking up of the imperial collection of the Mughals has often been a sequence of adventures. Some still exhibit distinct traces of the careless treatment to which they have been subjected, of being rolled up in a sepoy’s bedding together with other ‘loot’, of exposure and rough travel, of monsoon rains, of the relentless attacks of tropical insects, of many years of neglect, before they have again found their way into safe keeping. The marvel is that any of these delicate paintings have survived after the period of indescribable lawlessness and disorder that ensued in Northern India in the eighteenth century. When the Persian monarch, Nadir Shah, sacked Delhi in the year 1739, the first real inroad was made on the imperial library of Mughal manuscripts and miniatures, for the conqueror carried away to Teheran with the rest of his vast treasure a selection of the most valuable of these works of art. Some, bearing the seals of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, as well as evidences of a temporary sojourn in Persia, and later in Constantinople, have found homes in Paris, Berlin, Petrograd, and Vienna. During the war of the Rohillas, more than thirty years after the Persian’s devastations, much damage to the collections of art at the Mughal capital took place;