Between the years 1707 and 1857, the cultural center of Delhi in North India was the locus of a dramatic shift of power with the decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British Raj. This critical transitional period altered Indian culture, politics, and art, and brought unprecedented artistic innovation and experimentation. The artistic flowering of this time is evident in jewel-like portraits, miniature paintings, striking panoramas, and...

"The Mughal school of painting (mid-sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) produced a body of work of great distinction. This is the first comprehensive book of reference on the work of the nearly 300 Mughal painters with whose names we are acquainted." "Unlike the artists of the European Renaissance tradition, Mughal painters did not as a matter of course sign their work. Hence, the inscriptions that exist on paintings of the period require careful...

"Painting the Mughal Experience uses rare paintings from galleries across the world and draws on diverse textual sources to delve into the social history of dominant themes, motifs, and styles. The author provides a vivid account of the Mughal atelier and of the work of individual artists. In a comprehensive introduction he highlights the fresh treatment, in this style of painting, of real life situations - a feature that sets Mughal painting apart....

"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...