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02 Feb 2012

“Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin” at the Ashmolean, Oxford, 2 February-22 April

Visions of Mughal India exhibition. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

“The artist Howard Hodgkin has been a devoted collector of Indian paintings since his schooldays in the late 1940s. Progressively refined over the years, his collection has grown slowly but steadily and has long been considered one of the finest in the world. It is above all a personal collection, formed by an artist’s eye.

The Hodgkin collection comprises most of the main Indian court styles that flourished during the Mughal period (c.1560-1858): the refined naturalistic works of the imperial Mughal court, the poetic and subtly coloured paintings of the Deccani Sultanates, the bolder Rajput styles at the courts of the Hindu Maharajas in the Punjab Hills and Rajasthan. ” (from the exhibition website)


Making history: antiquaries in Britain, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2 February – 27 May

Hans Eworth, Mary I (1554), Society of Antiquaries, London

“Britain’s attempt to define itself as a nation, to characterize its history and to choose its villains and heroes was a project that touched on politics, literature, science, warfare, the arts and social relations. And while every modern nation engages in acts of excavation and imagination to shape its history and identity, and while this chronicle, like others, is full of errors and missteps, Britain’s efforts were extraordinarily important and had a lasting impact … this exhibition of more than 140 objects is based on one mounted by the Society of Antiquaries for its 300th anniversary in 2007 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The curators of the Yale show — Elisabeth Fairman, senior curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Yale Center, and Nancy Netzer, professor of art history and director of the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College — are both fellows of the Society of Antiquaries. They worked with their British counterparts, reshaping and supplementing the original exhibition (which is represented by a revelatory catalog).” (Edward Rothenstein in New York Times, 22 March 2012)