Nebahat Avcıoğlu “In the middle of the eighteenth century,” writes art historian Donald Preziosi, “an argument began to be made that sensory knowledge had a perfection of its own, which in its way was analogous to that of logic or ‘reason’.”[1] This volume contends that albums and album-making played an…
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…