The last feautured new additions to your art collection–attained through our privately supported acquisition program–are of Indian influence, adding to the South Asian collection.
The most intriguing of the variously shaped bronze artifacts produced in great quantities in north India during the 3rd through 2nd centuries BCE are those of abstracted humanoid design. How these objects were used is not known, but presumably it was for some ritual purpose. Although broken into several pieces, with the extremity of one of its two lower appendages being a modern restoration, this anthropomorph is extraordinary for its size. Only one known example is larger.
— Dr. John Henry Rice, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter, Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art
Anthropomorph, ca. 2500–1000 BCE, Indian, Uttar Pradesh, copper alloy, 24 x 16½ in. Gift of Terence McInerney in honor of Dr. Joseph M. Dye III
The last-known work by one of India’s most celebrated master painters, this double-portrait shows the artist Chokha’s patron Gokul Das II, ruler of Devgarh, receiving a lesser official. In keeping with the traditional Indian artistic convention of hierarchical scale, Gokul Das’s size indicates his relative superiority to the petitioner, but it is also descriptive. As
British administrator Colonel James Tod wrote, the ruler “was about six feet, perfectly erect, and a Hercules in bulk.”
— Dr. John Henry Rice, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter, Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art
Rawat Gokul Das and Rajawat Juvanji, 1826, Chokha, active ca. 1799–after 1826, Indian, Rajasthan, Devgarh, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 11 x 8¼ in. Aldine S. Hartman Endowment Fund
Indian and Western imagery is fittingly intermingled in this collaborative work of Manhattan-based Briton Alexander Gorlizki and master Indian miniature painter Riyaz Uddin. Luxuriating on an Indian bolster under a Rajput-style sun, Elvis Presley apparently hallucinates a vision in which a cow draws from a huqqa, and a cloud of smoke gives rise to the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. Flat, boldly colored patterns compress the pictorial space, and a parrot head confounds the distinction between picture and frame.
— Dr. John Henry Rice, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter, Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art
Pipe Dreams (Hot Elvis), 2006, Alexander Gorlizki (British, born 1967) & Riyaz Uddin (Indian, birth date unknown) New York City and Jaipur, India, opaque watercolor on paper, 9 x 10 7⁄8 in. Gift of Terence McInerney in honor of Dr. Joseph M. Dye III