A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s3.1

c20.s3.1

The roots of Indo-Persian, as of every form of art, go down deep into the remote past and ramify in various directions. Through Persia we can trace them into Russian Turkistan, or Transoxiana, Mesopotamia, and China; in India they draw nourishment from the soil of Hindu tradition, and to a lesser extent from that of European artistic teaching. Essentially the Indo-Persian drawings are a branch of Asiatic art, to be judged by the canons of that art, and not according to the standard fixed by the Renaissance masters; or as a French critic expresses himself, the student 'must throw over his artistic education, every critical tradition, and all the aesthetic baggage that has accumulated from the Renaissance to our own days'. To complain of the inattention to modern rules of perspective, of the lack of light and shade effects, of atmosphere, &c., is to start criticism from a wrong basis.¹ Such things concern the conventions of art, that is to say, the understood agreement between the draughtsman and the beholder as to the way in which solid forms should be represented on a sheet of paper. When we look at a Chinese picture we must be content to find distant objects at the top, and not at the points where they would be placed by European perspective science; but as artistic a picture may be made with one system for expressing distance as with another, provided both parties concerned, the artist and the spectator, are in agreement. We are not entitled to say that a Chinese picture is no good merely because the distant objects are at the top.¹