Andrew Topsfield Książki

Howard Hodgkin progressively refined his collection of Indian pictures over a period of more than 30 years. Its main strength lies in the Rajput schools, especially in those areas where the robust Rajput ethos and the imperial Mughul aesthetic overlapped and interfused, including a group of the animated elephant and hunting scenes from the court of Kota in Rajasthan. As a whole, the collection provides an unconventional and illuminating view of the expressive powers of Indian painters. This text, reissued to coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum, provides a complete survey and analysis of the individual works, which were selected by Howard Hodgkin himself in collaboration with Milo Cleveland Beach.

As the East India Company extended its sway across India in the late eighteenth century, many remarkable artworks were commissioned by Company officials from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Published to coincide with the first UK exhibition of these masterworks at The Wallace Collection, this book celebrates the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style and tastes and agency, all of whom worked for British patrons between the 1770s and the bloody end of the Mughal rule in 1857. Edited by writer and historian William Dalrymple, these hybrid paintings explore both the beauty of the Indian natural world and the social realities of the time in one hundred masterpieces, often of astonishing brilliance and originality. They shed light on a forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history during which Indian artists responded to European influences while keeping intact their own artistic visions and styles. These artists represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the onset of the twin assaults - photography and the influence of western colonial art schools - ended an unbroken tradition of painting going back two thousand years. As these masterworks show, the greatest of these painters deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time.

These paintings reveal the resilient imagination of the traditional Mewar artists under the influences of the Mughal School and later of Western art and photography.