A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s1.76

c20.s1.76

In Persia, at the close of the fifteenth century, the character of Tīmūrid art began to change, passing into the more delicate and sentimental style of the Safavide period in the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth century the refined Safavide style, with its lowered scale of colour, became familiar in India, where further local modifications were effected under the influence of Hindu tradition. The Indian artists ‘had a truer feeling for colour and more sober tonality’ than their Persian teachers, according to M. Blochet, who is disposed to think that the Indians sometimes carried the policy of softening colour to an undue extreme. They were wonderfully successful in their *grisaille* drawings of a single colour, frequently a pale sepia, with delicate gradations of tint, very pleasing to my eye. At the same time they developed a mastery over individual characteristic portraiture never equalled, I think, by the Persians. The best Indian work dates from the first half of the seventeenth century, but good portraits are to be found executed as late as the early years of the nineteenth century.