The nawabs (governors) of Avadh ruled the Gangetic plain of northern India from 1724 to 1856, a period that saw the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British East India Company (EIC). The nawabs negotiated these rival imperial relationships by cultivating a courtly culture that was…
An album of découpage created by the artist, writer, and Bluestocking Mary Delany sometime before the winter of 1781 has been strangely ignored in the scholarly record (Fig. 1). Gifted to George III’s consort, Queen Charlotte, it comprises twenty pages decorated with 114 individual cut-paper designs on a blue ground.…
Kee Il Choi Jr Though widely celebrated during his lifetime and in the nineteenth century for the intellectual scope of his Chinese collection, Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792), a minister of state to both Louis XV (r. 1715-1774) and Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792) of France, has until recently received scant attention by…
Gwendolyn Collaço Sumptuous holdings of the imperial treasury at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul have overwhelmingly shaped the history of Ottoman art collecting. There, among many objects, luxurious albums of sultans and their highest-ranking officials still reside today. Yet numerous and scattered compilations of works bought from the Ottoman bazaar or…
Freya Gowrley Between 1837 and 1852, an “Album” of poetry and personal sentiments was compiled for a woman named Helen Mar Robertson, who lived near Fort Edward, New York. Housed in a mass-produced volume, around quarto size, and labelled “Album” on its spine, the volume was published and sold by…
Marta Becherini Scattered across a variety of European museums and libraries are roughly 500 painted portraits which found their way to Europe from the Deccan region of South India towards the end of the seventeenth century. These paintings portray the kings, princes and grandees associated with four dynastic kingdoms of…
Louise Voll Box In 1922, the English writer George Somes Layard commented that: “A series of marks on a print is its diary: the fate and journey of many a masterpiece can be thereby traced until it finds at last its permanent home in the Museum.”[1] Layard succinctly foreshadowed what…
Anastassiia Alexandra Botchkareva Given the tumultuous political climate in eighteenth-century Iran and India, and the related falloff in imperial patronage of the arts of the book, it is perhaps unsurprising that the history of Persianate albums of this period remains largely unexplored.[1] While a number of Indian albums commissioned or…
The exhibition Michael Eden: Form & Transform is at Waddesdon Manor from May 25–Oct 21 2018. In November 2016, I visited Waddesdon Manor for the first time (Fig. 1). Coming up the long driveway, I noticed a series of decorative sculptures that were all wrapped to protect them from…
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch. Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2018), 336 pages. The Painter’s Touch. Dès son titre, ce beau livre introduit son lecteur à la riche polysémie d’un mot qui, en anglais, signifie à la fois la touche en peinture—construite au dix-huitième siècle comme un élément…