ORIGINAL MINIATURE PAINTINGS
Original miniature paintings from two traditions, Indian and Turkish. Each one is a single piece, painted by hand.
Indian miniatures from Udaipur
These are made in Udaipur, Rajasthan, home of the Mewar school. Mewar painting is one of the most traditional in India, with flat colour, bold line and almost no shading. It was painted for the Maharanas of Udaipur for centuries, mostly court life, festivals and animals. Everything here is painted in natural pigments, on genuinely old paper, handmade paper or cloth. The technique changes with the subject and includes freehand single-line brushwork with touches of gold, line and dots in ink and fine brushwork in colour.
Turkish miniatures from Anatolia
Ottoman miniature painting was a book art. It was made in the workshops of Istanbul, alongside calligraphy and illumination, by artists called nakkaş. It does not follow Western perspective. One image can show several viewpoints at once and there is no shading. In the tradition, pigments were ground to powder and bound with egg white, later gum arabic, with gold used alongside. Ours are hand painted with gold leaf on pages from antique Ottoman manuscripts, so the old page is part of the piece. Frame them between two sheets of glass to see both sides.