A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s1.49

c20.s1.49

Occasional memoranda of prices give some notion of the pecuniary value of such pictures. One of those specially noticed by Sir Joshua—a large sketch of Shahjahān holding court—is marked Rupees 200, equivalent in those days to at least £25 sterling. In the Johnson Collection at the India Office formed by Warren Hastings's banker, Richard Johnson, a drawing of Nawāb Shāyista Khān, a great noble of Aurangzēb's time (vol. xxii, fol. 5), is priced Rupees 170, and in another volume a number of more ordinary small portraits are priced at 25 rupees each. During the nineteenth century the taste for the work of the school was lost by both Europeans and Indians, and very few persons seemed to care what happened to the pictures, which were then procurable for nominal sums. Interest in them has now been revived, chiefly by reason of Mr. Havell's efforts and the publications of French scholars. According to Badāonī, Akbar's hostile critic, the courtiers' taste for illuminated books had been stimulated in his time by a certain amount of compulsion, and it was natural that, during the 'great anarchy' of the Marāthā period, when the influence of the Delhi court sank to nothing, the amount of liberal patronage by the minor native courts should diminish. Nevertheless, even during those stormy times much meritorious portrait work was produced, and some good portraiture was executed as late as the nineteenth century.