HA227: Indian Painting

Reading guide for week of 24 September

Use these readings to help guide your preparation for Friday’s discussion section.

Aside from your Beach textbook, the other readings are in the coursepack:

John Seyller, “Scribal Notes on Mughal Manuscript Illustrations,” Artibus Asiae, vol.48, nos.3-4 (1987), pp.247-77 (Read for interesting information about Mughal workshop practices)

Milo Cleveland Beach, The Imperial Image: Paintings for the Mughal Court (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1981), pp.15-25 (overview of Akbar period court art and artists)

Wheeler M. Thackston, ed./trans., The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.ix-xxv; 133; 279-281; 360-361 (draws a lively picture of Jahangir based on his own memoirs)

Glenn D. Lowry, “The Emperor Jahangir and the Iconography of the Divine in Mughal Painting,” Rutgers Art Review (1983), pp.37-45 (provides the context and analysis of a painting of Jahangir and his father Akbar)

Robert Skelton, “Imperial Symbolism in Mughal Painting,” in Priscilla P. Soucek, ed., Content and Context of Visual of Arts in the Islamic World (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), pp.179-187 (decodes the meanings of some paintings of Jahangir)

Gulammohammed Sheikh, “The Making of A Visual Language: Thoughts on Mughal Painting,” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos.30-31 (December 1997), pp.7-32 (an artist’s discussion of some aesthetic issues in pre-Mughal and Mughal paintings; very perceptive and lively)