Indian Paintings

The Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett's collection of Indian paintings bears witness to the rich art of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, mainly Mughal style, works from the Deccan, and the fascinating history of its reception in the West. It consists of two groups that came to Dresden during the Baroque and the Romantic eras, respectively. The first group, recorded in the earliest inventory compiled in 1738, predominantly consists of albums and sets of ruler's and noble's portraits. A second group of seventy-eight paintings contains a wide variety of topics. It entered the museum in 1848 as part of the bequest of the philologist August Wilhelm Schlegel. This scholarly catalogue publishes the entire holdings of Indian paintings in the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett for the first time, including an illuminated Shahnama that entered the collection in 2016 as a donation.