The Imperial Image: Paintings for the Mughal Court

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Milo Cleveland Beach, a museum director, teacher, and scholar of Indian painting, has written, lectured, and organized international exhibitions on paintings from Rajasthan and the Mughal court. He held curatorial positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, before becoming a professor at Williams College in Williamstown. Massachusetts. In 1984 he moved to Washington, D.C., to head the new Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. eventually becoming director of both that museum and the Freer Gallery of Art. Dr. Beach retired in 2001 and now devotes his time to research and lecturing.

Since 1981, when the earlier edition of The Imperial Image was published, many new acquisitions have been added to the collection of Indian paintings in the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution. The construction and opening in 1987 of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which is physically linked to and jointly administered with the Freer Gallery, further expanded the Asian art collections available in Washington. Before its inauguration, the Sackler had acquired a large and important group of Islamic paintings assembled by the French jeweler Henri Vever, including pages from many of the same manuscripts and albums represented already in the Freer, as well as other closely related works. Together, the Freer and Sackler Galleries now provide unrivalled resources for the exhibition and study of painting in Mughal India, and this new publication is the first to integrate these two collections.

Much new information about Mughal painting has been discovered and published since 1981. For that reason, many of the lists of comparative works and appendices included earlier have been omitted from this new edition. Much of that information has been updated and is available in the reference material cited throughout this study. As before, a small number of related works from other artistic centers has been included to establish a broader context.

For more than a century-since 1907, when Charles Lang Freer purchased his first set of indian Mughal paintings and manuscripts-the Freer Callery of Art and later the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery have been regarded as among the teading institutions for Mughal art. This is due to the exceptional quality of many of the museums paintings whose imperial ongin has prompted research especially on the relationships between the artists and their patrons Illustrated and calligraphic folios from the Saturnama the Jahangirnama, and the Late Shah Jahan Album among other manuscripts, have propelled the Galleries to the forefront of art historical scholarly discourse.

This interest in Mughal art has been made possible by the committed research and perceptive collecting of the staff and scholars who built upon Freer's initial foundation. To expand the Freer Gattery's early holdings in this field, the museum's first director John Fullerton Lodge, relied largely on his own discemment throughout his lengthy twenty- two-year tenure and on acquisitions from connoisseur Hagop Kevorkian. Richard Ettinghausen, curator from 1944 to 1967 and one of the great scholars of Islamic art, solidified the museum's international reputation as a leading resource on Mughal art, as did Thomas Lawton, who became director in 1977 and oversaw the construction and opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery ten years later. During the late 1970s, Milo Cleveland Beach, then associated with Williams College organized the groundbreaking exhibition The Imperial Image Paintings for the Mughal Court (1981), which focused on works in the Freer collection produced for the emperors of India largely between 1560 and 1640. That exhibition and its related catalogue, as well as Milo's appointment as director of the Freer and Sackler in 1988, helped to open a new era of connoisseurship in Mughal paintings.