Over the weekend, something exciting happened at the Nelson-Atkins. After months of anticipation, the new exhibition From the Land of the Taj Mahal: Paintings for India’s Mughal Emperors in the Chester Beatty Library opened to the public. Last week I got a behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibition led by the Museum’s new Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, Kimberly Masteller, and I was blown away by the quality of these paintings and calligraphies.
A phrase you will see in the exhibition is “beauty is in the details,” a completely appropriate description of nearly 80 works of art commissioned by the Mughal emperors of 17th-century India. The paintings are on a small scale, almost miniature, but they show in perfect detail images of the emperors’ life at court, the Indian landscape, and folklore traditions.
Every room (there are six!) follows a different theme, and the rich red, purple, and green walls bring out the vivid, shimmering tones of the art. It’s really impossible to describe how beautiful and bright these pieces are, in part because the Mughal imperial painters were using materials we rarely get to see today.
Real gold dust, ground lapis lazuli, and even an occasional pearl make their way into paintings made for rulers like Shah Jahan, who also commissioned the much larger but equally opulent Taj Mahal. The yellow dye seen in many of the paintings was even made using the urine of cows fed only mango leaves!
The natural ingredients in the Mughal artists’s media transfer especially well to images of the natural world and the landscape, which was clearly glorified by emperors who pictured heaven as a lush garden. One of my favorite paintings in the entire exhibition is a relatively simple one that features a single animal. A Mountain Sheep shows just that, a sheep standing on a rocky cliff in front of a glorious red sunset. Still, the sheep does have a gold necklace, so we know its life as a royal animal couldn’t have been too hard.
These paintings have traveled all the way from the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, and they’re only here for a few weeks until the exhibition closes on June 14. Since the paintings are rarely on public display and might not travel again for decades, be sure to see them here while you can!