Museum · New York, United States
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Indian sculpture and painting across two departments, Asian Art and Islamic Art. It holds most of the Shah Jahan Album, one of the great collections of Mughal painting.
See first
- Leaves of the Shah Jahan Album
- Hindu, Buddhist and Jain sculpture in the Asian Art galleries
- Indian paintings from the Kronos Collections
- The galleries for Later South Asia, in the Islamic wing
The Met came to India late. When it created a Department of Far Eastern Art in 1915, India was not included; the real push for a full Asian collection came only after 1970, under the board chair Douglas Dillon. It caught up through gifts. Samuel Eilenberg gave more than 400 works in 1987, including early works from India and Pakistan, and the Kronos Collections, formed by the former curator Steven Kossak, added sculpture and a growing body of Indian painting.
Mughal painting sits in the Department of Islamic Art, whose galleries for the Arab lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia reopened in 2011.
The centrepiece is the Shah Jahan Album, also called the Kevorkian Album. Jahangir began it, Shah Jahan added paintings, illumination and calligraphy, and around 1820 eleven more leaves were added and the whole rebound. The New York dealer Hagop Kevorkian bought it at Sotheby’s in London in 1929. Of its fifty folios, forty-one are at the Met and nine at the Freer in Washington. The Met’s 1987 book, The Emperors’ Album, reproduces them together.
