The Great Mughals, Art, Architecture and Opulence, edited by Susan Stronge, is a new book published by V&A publications to coincide with the exhibition currently on display at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.
Art history
Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries are, one comes to realize, one of the earliest example of mass commercial art, at least purely secular art, and one that still resonates with modern sensibilities. As testament to their volume, Britain’s Victoria & Albert Museum has, quite literally, tens of thousands of prints, a collection which began with an acquisition from the 1886 Exposition Universelle in Paris and rounded out, if that’s the word, with a purchase in 1886 (“at the height of Japonisme”) of more than 12,000 from the London-based Asian art dealer, SM Franck & Sons. Fortunately, this volume, which features prints from the collection, also testifies to their aesthetics and long-lasting appeal.
Silk Roads is the accompanying publication to the current exhibition on display at the British Museum in London. Written by the Curators of the Silk Roads exhibition, Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping and Elisabeth R O’Connell, this beautifully illustrated publication examines cross-cultural exchanges that occurred across Asia, Africa and Europe during 500 and 1000 CE.
The title (and cover) of Andrew Hillier’s new book The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life 1843-1853 might lead one to think that it is primarily a collection of drawings and paintings; but while the volume is indeed profusely-illustrated, it is rather more a biography of Henrietta Alcock, the wife of Rutherford Alcock, one of the first British consuls in the treaty ports of Xiamen, Fuzhou and Shanghai in the years immediately after the First Opium War. Both were, as it turns out, proficient at both sketching and watercolors.
The centrality of Central Asian nomads to world history has, after decades of neglect, more recently become something of a truism. If you’re not up on your Scythians, Saka, kurgans, Xiongnu, deer stones, Pazyryks and the like, there are better places to start than Petya Andreeva’s Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea, an analysis of the (mostly) iron-age objets-d’art of the peoples of the Eurasian steppe, which is detailed, granular and assumes more than a little familiarity with the peoples and history.
In 1844, a young Japanese artist named Sakurada Kyūnosuke (1823-1914) happened upon a daguerreotype, an early form of photography that had been invented in France five years earlier. Sakurada, who generally went by the name of Renjō, was at the time an apprentice in the studio of a painter of the Kanō school, a loosely organized group whose members had served for more than two centuries as the official artists of the Tokugawa regime. Renjō was astonished by the verisimilitude of the image he saw, but what shocked him was how it had been made: not with dyes and ink, but with a machine and chemical solutions. His stupefaction was such that he “broke all his brushes” and resolved henceforth to commit all his time and energy to learning photography.
The title of Women across Asian Art cannot do justice to the edited volume’s rich and varied content. Ranging over 3,000 years, the book is not only about women, but also gender. It is not limited to “art”, but takes on a more wide-ranging body of material culture and its associated disciplines, including archaeology and architecture. Geographically, it spans East and South Asia and beyond, albeit skewing sinocentric.