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Browsing by Author "Beach, Milo Cleveland"
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Item The Grand Mogul Imperial Painting in India - 1600-1660(Published by Sterling and Francine Clark Art institute, Massachusetts, 1978) Beach, Milo ClevelandMughal painting has been known and appreciated in Europe since the early seventeenth century. Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to the Mughal Court between 1615 and 1618, brought paintings back to England, and in 1639 a Mughal album was presented to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University by Archbishop Laud. Moreover, Rembrandt’s copies (made in the 1650s) of Mughal portraits are generally familiar, Exhibitions of Indian painting have appeared in both England and the United States recently with considerable frequency. These have usually been either broad surveys and comparisons of the many types of painting done throughout the subcontinent, or else investigations of the entire Mughal tradition from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In being severely limited to just six decades, however, and to one school, this exhibition demands far more of the viewer, for the range of artistic intention is very restricted. The extremes of style and taste which so enliven the wide-ranging survey are replaced by the exploration of one small—but absolutely central—phase of the Mughal tradition: the achievement of what is usually termed “Mughal naturalismItem The Imperial Image - Paintings for the Mughal court(Published by Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, 1981) Beach, Milo ClevelandIn Muslim India, as in the Islamic world generally, books were regarded as precious objects. Physically valuable because of the materials and time that went into their preparation, they were tangible evidence of wealth, intelligence, and power. They were also among the most coveted spoils of war. The Emperor Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur recorded in his memoirs (the Babur-nama) an incident in his battle with Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi, whose defeat in 1526 established the Mughal dynasty in India: