Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin

A good collection of Mughal art. This is a passionate book documenting the love and lifetimes interest in the style of the Mughal era. Well written and comprehensive.

I visited the "Visions of Mughal India" exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and came away with the catalogue, the cover of which looks just like this Amazon offering. Amazon's product details/description imply that this is the catalogue, and the quoted ISBN is identical with the EAN in mine. However, mine has 288 pages and is definitely 3.0cm thick!If it is the same book, it includes Howard Hodgkin's 1991 essay on his Collection, updated by a 2011 postscript. Author Andrew Topsfield then writes about Hodgkin and Mughal art. Each of the 115 works, which date from about 1570 through to 1870, gets a whole page to itself, while explanatory text sits opposite. Lots of soft white space: nothing feels crowded. And some pictures get additional coverage - a double-page spread - when the fine detail demands. Hodgkin writes more About My Collection, On Collecting Indian Paintings and On Indian Drawings in the three appendices.As a state-registered philistine, I am personally comfortable with the heresy that the book can be more enjoyable than the exhibition itself. Inevitably, museum illumination is subdued and the shows are ephemeral, while the book can be safely exposed, whenever you want, to stronger light. And you will need this - and perhaps a magnifying glass - to explore the astonishing detail in many of the pictures. This was without doubt the heyday of the one-hair brush.The subjects range widely: portraits; wildlife; domestic scenes both modest and grand; battles; pastoral and hunting scenes; mythology; street scenes and processions. The colours are vibrant (lots of red and orange), the artists' patrons (mostly male) are handsome and heroic, the court and palace interiors opulent, the elephants - so many elephants! - magnificent, the girls gorgeous, the demons comically scary.The explanatory texts are invaluable, shedding light on the alien social scenes and landscapes and helpfully pinpointing the odd detail otherwise easily overlooked. Some pictures bustle with activity; some are superbly spare. Some have deeply saturated hues, others are line-art with minimal colour. The unfamiliar drawing styles, the facial expressions, the sheer exuberance, the revealed subtleties: so often, I find myself smiling.I sense that this recent acquisition will be a book to return to, time and again. Hodgkin says, "These pictures have been chosen because I thought they were beautiful, because they touched my emotions, and not for any scholarly purposes. It is a collection made by an artist. I hope you enjoy looking at it."I do, and I'm sure many others will, too.

Some great images that explore Mughal history. I'm taking this book very slowly and flick through a couple of pages in a quiet/ lazy moment.

Good reproductions.

This book has large pictures of art pieces with commentary by the collector on the opposite page. I don't know the world of art from Mughal India, but the pieces in this collection are detailed, bright and illustrate a very different culture. Great to look at enjoy and to learn about Mughal India.

If you trust the aesthetic judgement of the painter,Howard Hodgkin, this record of his collection of Indian paintings will be a visual and intellectual treat. Exquisite art reproductions and interesting commentary both from scholars of the period and and from the collector himself.

Each page has a large picture of the painting along with a detailed description.The size of the book makes it enjoyable to view the pictures.

Much is made of the quality of Hodgkin's collection due to his artists eye. Not so much evidence of anything beyond what seems like a decent collection, but hardly transcendental! There are a lot of elephant paintings!He says that much Indian painting is bad but surely this applies to Western painting too. Anyway if you like elephant drawings and paintings this is the book for you!