Paintings from Mughal India.

• Author: Gude, Tushara Bindu
• Position: Book review

Paintings from Mughal India. By ANDREW TOPSFIELD. Oxford: BODLEIAN LIBRARY, 2008. Pp. 175, 80 color plates. [pounds sterling]30, $65.00. [Distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press.]

Among The riches of the Bodleian Library in Oxford is an important collection of South Asian paintings, and of Mughal paintings in particular. Although this collection has long been known to scholars, it has been neither published nor exhibited extensively. The author notes in the foreword that this book had its origins in a painting exhibition held at the Library in 2006-7 for which he served as guest curator. Remarkably, this exhibition was the first extensive showing of the Bodleian Library's South Asian paintings since 1947. The last handbook of the collection was published in 1953, although twenty-four artworks from the Library were included in Andrew Topsfield's 1994 publication Indian Paintings from Oxford Collections (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum and Bodleian Library). For these reasons alone, the volume under review is a welcome addition to the ever-growing corpus of books devoted to South Asian courtly painting traditions.

Paintings from Mughal India is a catalogue that includes more than two-thirds of the approximately sixty paintings shown in the above-mentioned 2006-7 exhibition. Its primary aim is to highlight the gems of the Bodleian's South Asian painting collection while also indicating its broader scope, which encompasses Deccani, Rajasthani, and Company paintings in addition to a Mughal core. In the book's introduction Topsfield gives a brief overview of South Asian courtly painting traditions. In direct reference to the works illustrated in the book, the introduction begins with the emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), who consolidated the early Mughal Empire and encouraged the formation of a distinct style of painting. Under the direction of Persian artists who had been brought to India by his father. Akbar's atelier synthesized Persian and native Indian traditions in their illustrations to various manuscripts cycles that included Persian and Hindu literary works and Mughal histories, among other subjects. European themes and styles, derived largely from prints, were also admitted into Mughal artistic vocabularies. Their most lasting impact would be seen in the tradition of court portraiture that emerged under Akbar and continued under his heirs. Touching upon painting techniques and the assembly of individual paintings into elaborate albums, Topsfield...