A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s1.61

c20.s1.61

The small paintings on ivory, generally oval in shape, produced freely at Delhi for the benefit of tourists, are obviously imitations in form of the English miniatures made fashionable at native courts towards the close of the eighteenth century by John Smart, Ozias Humphreys, and other able artists who then came out to India to ‘shake the pagoda-tree’. The subjects of the modern Delhi miniatures, as a rule, are copied by a mechanical stencil process from older pictures or stock drawings, and thus have no claim to rank as works of original art. The execution of the better specimens is admirable, displaying to advantage the Indian qualities of patience, steadiness of hand, and firm drawing of line, but the lack of inspiration deprives these pretty trifles of artistic interest and reduces them to the level of mere curiosities and mementoes of travel. The style of the painting follows the tradition of the Indo-Persian school of the seventeenth century.