Mughal and Rajput Painting from a Private Collection

Nearly all the paintings on display here are well-known by students and scholars of Indian painting; the majority of them are considered among the greatest works ever produced by Indian artists. Intended for a variety of purposes (inclusion in albums, illuminations to texts, natural history studies, visual aids for oral recitations), the range of subjects is correspondingly wide -- royal portraits, history, poetry, epics, genre, flora and fauna. This diversity in context and subejct derives from a patronage similarly variegated, yet nearly always representing the taste and aspirations of the different ruling elites in India during the 16th-19th centuries: Mughal emperors and Deccani sultans who embraced Islam, Hindu rulers of Rajasthan and the Punjab Hills, and officials of the British East India Company.

Arising from this range of context, subject and patronage is an implicit concern that interweaves and permeates all of the later history of Indian painting -- the alternating conflict and union of the real and the ideal, the naturalistic and the conceptual, the physical and the spiritual worlds. Mughal concerns for recording the world around them allied with the influence of European prints and engravings to produce a naturalism that subordinated the early formative influence of Persian painting with its artificial, stylized vision. In many ways the history of later Indian painting can be seen as the dissemination of the Mughal style and its naturalistic bent, which featured portraiture, genre, atmospheric effects, scientific perspective, zoological studies and historical painting. The impact of the imperial mode effectively transformed painting in many of the smaller Hindu courts, where earlier bold, conceptual styles developed for religoius painting were softened by the realistic features of secular Mughal painting and later by British painting and eventually photography. Even under radical changes in patronage, exemplified by paintings done for the British East India Company, a blissful coincidence of taste, purpose, and technique continued to produce a vibrant realism.

However, it is a distortion to overemphasize the naturalistic aspect of Indian painting during this period. Often subdued but never completely discarded or disavowed was the tendency to alter and manipulate the visible world, for formal, political and religious purposes. The conceptualism of Persian painting is still evident in early Mughal poetic manuscripts and een more so in the formalism of state portraits, which required decorative abstractions of power to function effectively as visual state documents. The Deccani sultanates closely adhered to the non-naturalistic palette of Iran as well as its secular and mystical themes to embrace an idealized and visionary view of the world. The Hindu courts, while open and receptive to naturalistic influences, often remained strongly conceptual and two-dimensional, their conventions only gradually admitting human emotion and visible reality. Even the strikingly Western qualities of Company School painting seems somehow supra-real rather than naturalistic, partially a result of their blank backgrounds and abstracted context.

These twin modes of vision in later Indian painting were used by Indian artists to record as well as alter reality, to order it according to the dictates of taste, ideology, or imagination. Both, however, can perhaps be seen as the dualities inherent in a single yearning. The awe of secular might and the wonder at the splendor of natural beauty found in painting a means of transcendence, for both ultimately reached for the divine.