Explore the remarkable collection of Indian paintings and drawings of the artist Howard Hodgkin.
By the 17th century, highly refined styles of painting had developed further south, in the central Deccan plateau region of India, at the independent Muslim courts of the Sultans of Bijapur and Golconda. Mughal political and cultural dominance was growing, and in 1686-1687 both courts finally fell to the emperor Aurangzeb’s armies. Yet even as the Deccani artists began to assimilate Mughal conventions of portraiture, they reinterpreted them with their own innate sense of poetry and fantasy, and with a rich and subtle palette, often with extensive use of gold.
Among the Deccani masterpieces in the Hodgkin collection are the two great Bijapur portraits, Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah and Ikhlas Khan riding an elephant and Ali Adil Shah shooting a tiger (LI118.54), as well as the Illumination in the form of a vase (LI118.66), a remarkable work of decorative imagination.
Objects from past exhibitions may have now returned to our stores or a lender. Click into an individual object record to confirm whether or not an object is currently on display. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis, so please contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular Eastern Art object.
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