A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s1.1

c10.s1.1

IF Indian art as a whole may complain of undeserved depreciation and neglect, one branch of it, the Hellenistic sculpture of the regions on the north-western frontier, anciently known as Gandhāra, has received its full share of attention in Europe and been the subject of voluminous discussion. The existence of an Indo-Hellenic school of sculpture was not recognized generally until 1870, when the late Dr. Leitner brought to England a considerable collection of specimens, to which he gave the name of Graeco-Buddhist. But so far back as 1833 Dr. Gerard had disinterred the first known example, a circular relief of Buddha, from the chamber of a ruined *stūpa* near Kābul.¹ In 1836 James Prinsep published his account of the so-called 'Silenus' discovered by Colonel Stacy at Mathurā, which will be discussed in the next chapter; and in 1848 Cunningham examined the ruins of Jamālgarai to the north-east of Peshāwar. His observations, however, were not published until many years later. The first description of a selection of the Jamālgarai sculptures was that printed by Sir E. C. Bayley in the *Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal* for 1852,² with illustrations so miserably rude that they gave little notion of the aesthetic value of the objects described. The sculptures thus imperfectly illustrated, having been subsequently brought to England, perished in the fire at the Crystal Palace which also destroyed Major Gill's copies of the Ajaṇṭā frescoes. Thus it happened that, as already observed, Dr. Leitner is entitled to the credit of having first convinced the learned world of the fact that during the early centuries of the Christian era North-Western India was the home of a school of Hellenistic sculpture of considerable artistic merit.