"Mughal patrons and artists doted on the world and its inhabitants. No pains were spared to record them realistically in life-oriented pictures,usually of people and animals. The people are exceptional--some of mankind's most extraordinary wordlings and wisest saints, shown in depth, to be scrutinized inside and out. All the folios reproduced here were made for the Mughal emperors of India or their immediate families during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were intense essences of their culture, showing emperors and their courts in elaborate settings, scenes of suspense and excitement depicting huns, demons, and elegant elephants, as well as a group of striking genre scenes in which the subtle rendering of light, learned form European painting, imparts a poetic quality that provides a striking conrast to the highly finished treatment of the royal portraits. The Introduction and Commentaries to the individual folios reproduced here have been provided by Stuart Cary Welch of The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University."--back cover

Books have been treasured for centuries in the Islamic world, as precious objects worthy of royal admiration. This was especially true in Muslim India, where generations of Mughal emperors commissioned and collected volumes of richly illuminated manuscripts and lavishly illustrated folios. They assembled workshops of the leading artists and calligraphers to produce the books that filled their extensive libraries. Today, those works remain a vibrant part of India's cultural and artistic history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this revised and expanded edition of his popular 1981 book, Dr Milo Beach presents the superb collection of Mughal painting in the Freer Gallery of Art. He adds many of the outstanding works that entered the collection with the opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1987. Together, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian's museums of Asian art, have the distinction of being one of the world's leading repositories of Mughal art. An introductory essay examines the Mughal art of the book and traces the contributions of a succession of rulers in Muslim India. Brief artist biographies and an extensive bibliography complete this updated volume.

One of the minor miracles of art history is the extraordinary flowering of Indian painting that began in the mid-sixteenth century under the early Mughal emperors of Indian, notably Akbar the Great. Only in recent decades has the consummate artistry of early Mughal painting come to be widely appreciated in the West. Scholars have noted the innovations--departures from both Islamic and native Indian tradition--of the new, highly distinctive school of painting, among them natural history studies, a concern for portraiture, and the documentation of contemporary court events. Milo Beach traces, with an abundance of captivating illustrations, the evolution of the Mughal style. While acknowledging the influence of Akbar's interests and changing tastes (related in turn to historical and biographical circumstances), he shows that many of the new tendencies were evident during the short reign of Akbar's father, the Emperor Humayun, whose role as patron of the arts is thereby reassessed. Beach also stresses the traditionalism of the individual painters, who only gradually changed their concepts and compositions in response to foreign influences and to imperial taste. Mughal art, he affirms, can no longer be regarded as simply a reflection of its imperial patrons. The book takes account of recently discovered material and reproduces for the first time important paintings from unpublished manuscripts and albums. It will appeal to the general reader as well as the scholar.

Fifty leaves that form the sumptuous Kevorkian Album, one of the world's greatest assemblages of Mughal art. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.