The Mughal Dynasty descended from Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, is legendary for its wealth, power, and aristocratic grandeur, but the paintings commissioned by these great emperors have not met wide and continuous acclaim. Although Rembrandt drew copies of the Mughal portraits he collected, Mughal pictures have not until recent times been duly appreciated in the West, perhaps because Western connoisseurs regarded them as Channing, but not quite “serious” creations of an exotic tradition. One need only turn, however, through the pages of this volume to grasp their great aesthetic worth an extraordinary appeal from the majestic portraits and vibrant bird and animal studies to the superb calligraphy and magnificent ornaments.

Fortunately, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired and continues to acquire, Mughal art so discerningly often through the wisdom and generosity of New York collectors that we have assembled one of the world's richest Mughal collections. We cite a few especially fine examples: a floral carpet with trellis pattern made for Shah Jahan (Bequest of Benjamin Altman, I913]; a very large, splendidly animated late 17th-century rug (Gift of I. Pierpont Morgan, I917], magnificent miniatures of the same period from a manuscript of Amir Khusrau's Quintet (Gift of Alexander Smith Cochran, 1913); folios from Dastan-i-Amir Hamzah, painted for the emperor Akbar in the r57os (Rogers Fund, I918}; ]ahangir’s jade inkpot, dated 161849 (Gift of George Coe Graves, 1929]; many remarkable early Mughal miniatures (Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915, and Purchase, Edward C. Moore, Ir. Gift, 1928); a prayer rug made for Shah Jahan (Bequest of Joseph V McMullan, I973); and a mid-17th-century dagger with a jade hilt in the form of a nilgai and a stunning late 16th-century painting of a lion at rest (Gift of Alice Heeramaneck, in memory of Nasli Heeramaneck, I985 ). Outstanding among the Museum's Mughal holdings is the series of forty-one leaves from the Kevorkian Album [the other nine leaves are in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art). This entire assemblage of miniatures, calligraphies, and illuminations is published here for the first time. The leaves we value most were made for the emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan to be enjoyed in the company of family and close friends; these thirty-nine seventeenth-century leaves were supplemented in the early nineteenth century with appealing but comparatively slight copies and variants of earlier compositions.

Although we do not know when or how the Kevorkian Album leaves left the imperial collections in the Red Fort in Delhi, their peregrinations took them to a Delhi art dealer who bound them with the later leaves; the resulting album made its way through obscure routes to Scotland, where it was discovered in 1929 in an antique shop by a sharp-eyed English couple. That same year, just before the Great Depression, the album was acquired from them through a London auction sale by Hagop Kevorkian to whose memory we dedicate this volume.

The art-loving founder of The Hagop Kevorkian Fund, which has so enriched the Museum on many occasions and which has generously supported this publication, Mr. Kevorkian also gave the Museum many of its magnificent miniatures, illuminations, and calligraphies. Although our primary indebtedness for this publication is to Mr. Kevorkian and his Fund, we are also grateful to the authors who so thoroughly discuss the Kevorkian Album. The project was proposed several years ago prior to his major undertaking, the watershed exhibition India: Art and Culture, 1300-1900- by Stuart Cary Welch, Special Consultant in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art from 1981 until 1987. For many years, both here and at Harvard University, he has shared his connoisseur's enthusiasm and scholarly devotion to Mughal art through teaching and writing and has inspired a new generation of impassioned Mughals. This volume was planned by him, and he has contributed a lively introduction to Mughal painting and painters and many brief but insightful essays.

Mughal Library