Islamic Drawings

Superbly executed in watercolor and ink, this charming and lovely depiction of Mother Goose nursery rhyme characters -- including Humpty Dumpty, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, The Three Little Pigs and Old King Cole -- was created by Maurice Greenberg...

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

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

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

The hand-written notes on the back of this miniature watercolor tell what was, at the time, a scandalous story. The portrait is of Hanah Tichbon. The inscription reads in part, "wen...

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 framed watercolor and gouache on paper depicting sliced watermelon on a color block background, signed Tamayo and dated 1945 as shown. The work was in keeping with the style of Rufino Tamayo and it retains a paper label from Salon de la Plastica Mexicana, listing the detail info. SPM was formed in 1949 to promote contemporary Mexican artists...

Grand Tour charcoal and watercolor drawing executed by an English tourist in Italy, circa 1800, depicting a gentleman peering over a staircase balustrade in a Baroque interior...

A watercolor by Robert Freiman.

Fantastic pair of Ca. late 18thC. Hand Colored Monkey Prints Framed matted and sealed under glass. They have information on the back but I don’t read French

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...

Alfred Owles (1894-1978) "The Long Wait" original watercolor, circa 1970s Fine watercolor of two cowboys waiting for the stagecoach in an American West...