Antique Indian/Indo-Persia Moghul Islamic Illustrated Manuscript Folio

A fine antique Indian or Indo-Persia Moghul Islamic Illustrated manuscript folio. Depicting monkeys gathering fruit at the base of the tree. ...

A fine antique Islamic pottery fragment. Perfect for the Kunstkammer or curio cabinet. Mounted on a wooden plinth. Bearing stickers to...

A fine drawing in ink and watercolor on paper of the modernist dancer Isadora Duncan by Abraham Walkowitz. Walkowitz (1878-1965) had an intimate artistic relationship with Duncan....

A fine drawing in ink and watercolor on paper of the modernist dancer Isadora Duncan by Abraham Walkowitz. Walkowitz (1878-1965) had an intimate artistic relationship with Duncan...

Offered here for your consideration is a vintage original Earl MacPherson pastel painting of a pin-up girl. Depicting a blond, smiling, nude pin-up girl dressed only with two larg...

A view from a balcony by Lambro Ahlas. Charcoal pencil on paper. Matted in a black matte under glass in a thin gilt frame. Ahlas was a California-born artist of Greek ancestry....

An antique Indo Persian Mughal Art miniature gouache painting on antique manuscript leaf depicting an interior scene with a prince surrounded by ret...

A miniature Indo Persian Mughal Art watercolor painting on antique manuscript leaf depicting a portrait of a Royal person, probably Jahangir, the f...

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...

A Collection of Engravings Illustrating 18th Century Furniture and Objects that the artist felt represented certain locations around the world...

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...