ISBN10: 0870994999, ISBN13: 9780870994999, [publisher: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York] Hardcover First Edition 31.5 by 24cm., 318pp., colour and black and white. The Emperors' Album: Images of Mughal India publishes the fifty leaves that form the Kevorkian Album, one of the world's great assemblages of Mughal art and calligraphy, for the first time. Thirty-nine leaves date from the 17th century; the other eleven leaves were created in the early 19th century and were bound with the earlier ones, most probably by a Delhi art dealer. The resulting album took its name from Hagop Kevorkian, a noted benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum and of many other cultural institutions, who purchased it in London in 1929. Over the next decades nine of the leaves went to the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in 1951 the remaining forty-one leaves came to the Metropolitan Museum. The 17th-century leaves include masterpieces of Mughal portraiture, superb natural history studies, and magnificent specimens of calligraphy. Commissioned by the great emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan, these works were meant for private enjoyment, images to be shared with delight by the imperial family and their close friends. These pictures were created in the imperial ateliers by the greatest artists of the day. In Stuart Cary Welch's introduction and in the texts he has written for each painting, these artists are identified, and the biographical information available ...
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