Accompanies an exhibition at the Museum Rietberg, Zurich (1 May – 21 August 2011) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (26 September 2011 – 8 January 2012)
800 pages, in 2 volumes, hardcover; 310 x 230 mm, over 500 illustrations
PRICE: £120.00
ISBN: ISBN 978 3 907077 50 4
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Accompanying an exhibition that promises to be the most comprehensive survey of Indian painting that the West has ever seen, this beautiful twovolume catalogue spans 800 years of Indian painting, and some 240 masterpieces by more than 40 artists. These great Indian masters are unquestionably the equals of Du?rer, Michelangelo or Vermeer. The artworks shown in the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, and later at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, come from such outstanding collections as the Royal Collection of Windsor Castle, the Golestan Palace in Tehran or the Institute for Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg.
Although Indian painters were celebrated as ‘wonders of their age’ by their contemporaries, for a long time very little was known about their lives. There are no Indian equivalents of sources such as Vasari’s biographies of European Renaissance artists. The fact that artistic traditions were shaped within a family, a workshop, or a court, adds to the difficulty of attributing works to individual artists. But thanks to many years of painstaking research, the deciphering of microscopically small signatures, analyses of pilgrim registers, and, especially, stylistic comparisons, more is now known. For example, about Farrukh Beg, who painted in Iran, in Kabul, Lahore, Bijapur, and Agra, or the brothers Manaku and Nainsukh who, despite their joint training in their father‘s workshop, differ significantly in style.
This exhibition and catalogue celebrates the most gifted, inventive and eccentric amateurs of the 18th and early 19th centuries with a selection of drawings, engravings and portraits gathered from Soane's collection and other museums, archives and private houses around the country. More