Antique Indian/Indo-Persia Moghul Islamic Illustrated Manuscript Folio

Historical pair of 18th Century Indo Persian manuscripts hand decorated in gouache depicting cultural events. Presented under glass in gilt wood fra...

Culturally significant 18th Century Indo Persian manuscript hand painted in gouache depicting historical events. Presented under glass in a parcel g...

Charming 18th Century illustrated manuscript of an elephant with passengers executed in gouache on paper on the front and exposed manuscript on the back. Presented in a gold tone woo...

An antique Megillah The Book of Esther, hand written on parchment by an expert Sephardi scribe and richly decorated with hand painted illustrations. The text panels are surrounded by...

This pair of manuscript pages are 18th century and are done it water colour and gauche. The images are of people in landscapes and the colors are still...

A unique large hand-drawn map of Surinam by Albrecht Helmut Hiemcke (German, 1760-1839) ? 'Colonie Surinaame', 1830 A large hand-drawn and coloured map of the colony of Suri...

This Mughal miniature was painted at one of the princely courts of India. It depicts a raven-haired princess in a gold-trimmed saffron-colored silk sari. Under a glowering evening sky she dawdles on a white marble terrace, with a pet fawn on a leash, before a landscape dotted with buildings nestled amongst trees beyond a river. Her hair, falling loosely about her shoulders, rather than carefully dressed on her head, indicates that she is a maiden. The overall mood is one of expectancy. Perhaps walking a pet and catching an evening breeze is a pretext to escape palace scrutiny for a lovers’ assignation. In Mughal India tender sentiments were a bridge to the erotic – and if this seems contradictory, so too is the balance of realism and caricature, and naturalism with the schematic. Both are hallmarks of miniatures painted in this place and time. The earliest Mughal Indian miniatures date to the 16th century. They were inspired by those painted at the refined Moslem courts of the neighboring Persian empire. They incorporated figures in spite of the Moslem faith’s proscription against depicting the human form. Such was the nature of sophisticated courtly life everywhere that beauty and pleasure trumped systems of morality. This was no less the case at the provincial Indian courts, where our miniature, marked by a charming pictorial naiveté, was most likely painted. Yet the artist was undeniably accomplished. His command of perspective, introduced by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century, is seen in the landscape, which rolls back to a distant horizon, contrary to the flat two-dimensional ones following Indian-painting traditions. And if Mughal artists were influenced by Western art, the compliment was returned by Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds, among others, who collected Indian miniatures (as did, perhaps, Giovanni Bellini who painted in Mughal style the famous miniature of a Persian man...

1950s Indian Mughal gouache colorful paper drawing of a hunting party on an antique court fee stamp official paper of the state of Jaipur. Part of a l...

1970s Indian bonsai paper drawing.

1970s Indian religious ink drawing. It is part of a private collection.