Indian Miniature Mica Painting

This exquisite Indian miniature painting is a 19th-century reproduction of the Chamba School painting "Portrait of Rāj Singh of Chamba," dated circa 1785. Beautifully honoring the or...

Despite its explicit content, this intimate scene conveys a sense of tenderness and romantic love characteristic of Chinese erotic art. Known as “sp...

Chinese New Year paintings (nian hua) are colorful folk paintings created to celebrate the annual Spring Festival. Drawn or printed by folk artists in regional studios, nian hua pain...

Chinese New Year paintings (nian hua) are colorful folk paintings created to celebrate the annual Spring Festival. Drawn or printed by folk artists in regional studios, nian hua pain...

Pair Antique 19th Century Indian Miniature Mica Paintings C.1830 Indian Company School A pair of 19th Century Indian mica gouache paintings on mica. Depicting the water carrier and of a Purdah bullock...

Lot of nine 19th century Indian "Company School" miniature gouache paintings on mica. Shows nine men in different white attire. "Company School" paintin...

An antique Indian Mughal Empire miniature painting executed in gouache and embellished with gold on paper, portrays a captivating court scene wherein a ruler engages with nobles. The...

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...