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Coloring Book from the Welch Collection

July 29, 2020 / / 0 Comments

By popular demand, and to brighten your quarantines, the Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection has come out with a coloring book! These images are all from this fantastic open-access collection, and we hope you’ll have fun with it.

Feel free to use the links in the coloring book to see the full-color versions, or just go with your imagination! We’d love to see your completed pictures! If you’d like to share, use the hashtags #ColoringWelch and #ColorOurCollections, or tag us at @HarvardFineArtsLibrary on Instagram,  @MENALibAHS on Twitter, #harvardfineartslib on Tumblr, and follow us if you haven’t already.

Click on the image below to download our 2020 coloring book.

 

Front cover of the coloring book

Coloring Book from the Welch Collection

 

 

 

Stuart Cary Welch Islamic & South Asian Photograph Collection – Part 5. Overview: Islamic Art in Private Collections

March 30, 2020 / / 0 Comments

This post is the fifth in a series about the Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection written by the project’s staff and student catalogers in the Digital Images and Slides Collections of the Fine Arts Library. Written by Alice West.

The importance of our open access Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Digital Images Collection has been noted in this series of blog posts. Yet, since the research, digitization, and cataloging of the collection is an on-going effort, we have not developed any systematic general description of this resource. But as the number of digitized images has grown, we have begun to define broad categories of images that could help researchers and art lovers around the world better understand what the Welch Collection can offer to them. This multi-part series from the project’s staff cataloger Alice West aims to highlight key strengths of the Welch Collection as a whole. In her first post, West describes one of the important subsets of the collection: works in private collections.

In this digital era, it may seem that anything one needs to find is readily available online. Yet researchers in any field, and in the field of Islamic art in particular, know that this perception is deceiving. Relative to the overall number of important Islamic manuscripts and artifacts, the number of their images available online or, for that matter, in print, is surprisingly low. There are many reasons for this, including shortage of technical and financial resources available for digitization efforts, as well as the unwillingness of institutions and private collectors to share their treasures with the public due to economic, political, ownership, and other concerns.

The Welch Collection fills in some of the ‘digital gaps’ by offering images from multiple sources that may not be otherwise available to the public. What are these gaps? One of the largest in terms of accessibility is private collections. Initially assembled for personal enjoyment, many prominent private collections from the late 19th–mid-20th century were later sold, bequeathed, or transferred to permanent hold to public museums and libraries. These include the collections of Calouste Gulbenkian, Victor Goloubew, Nasli Heeramaneck, Edmund de Unger, Leo S. Figiel, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, and many others. The majority of these collections have been fully or partially digitized by the hosting institutions. At the same time, many of the collections stayed private and are closed to the public eye. Although our digitization effort is not completed, we can already say that the Welch Collection holds hundreds of images of paintings, calligraphy, and decorative art that are currently held in otherwise inaccessible private collections, including that of B. W. Robinson, Bedros Sevadjian, Stuart Cary Welch, and many anonymous owners.

Periodically, objects from these collections are offered at auctions such as Sotheby’s or Christie’s, and one may find their images online or in older auction catalogs. These are, however, expensive and not widely available. Even when an image is available on the auctioneer’s website, Welch’s collection, in most cases, offers a superior image or its details (close-ups).

 

Side-by-side photos of painting from a private collection, illustrating the superior quality of the images from the Welch collection. On left, a bearded man in a jeweled turban and earrings is shown in profile from the waist up, seated formally on a red divan and holding a white teacup. Image has a soft focus and yellow hues. Same photo on right (Welch collection) has dramatically higher resolution.

A Portrait of Raja Bhao Singh of Bundi. 18th century. Private collection. Detail. (Pic. 1a. Left: Photo: Sotheby’s. Pic. 1b. Right: Welch Collection)

 

An example of one such object is A Portrait of Raja Bhao Singh of Bundi, currently in a private collection. This portrait was sold in May 2006 by Sotheby’s, and its image is still available on the auctioneer’s website (1a. picture on the left). The Welch’s image, however, is obviously crisper and clearer in comparison, and its high resolution also allows for excellent close-ups (1b. picture on the right).

 

Side-by-side views of a miniature painting, illustrating detail visible only in the close up photos of the Welch collection. Full-view panel on left depicts a ruler sitting cross-legged on a platform surrounded by courtiers, with candles and wine set before him. Worshippers in the background gaze at the new moon from the flat rooftop of a tall building. The detail at right (Welch collection) reveals two young male courtiers in turbans and richly-embroidered clothing, praying with eyes closed and hands raised against a night sky.

Divan of Hafez, Celebration of ‘Id. c. 1527, private collection. Full view (Pic. 2a. Left ) and detail (Pic. 2b. Right). Photo: Welch Collection.

 

Another example is Celebration of ‘Id from a dispersed Divan of Hafez, which is a relatively well-known miniature held by the private Art and History Trust of the Soudavar family and seen in several publications, most notably on the cover of Abolala Soudavar’s large volume of Reassessing Early Safavid Art and History. The Welch collection, however, offers quite a different look at this miniature by providing an amazing level of detail in its forty five unique high-resolution images of the miniature’s different sections (2a – 2d).

 

Three gem-studded gold bottles with long elegant necks on an elaborately-decorated low hexagonal table.

Pic. 2c. Divan of Hafez, Celebration of ‘Id. c. 1527. Detail.  Photo: Welch Collection.

 

Woman in festive clothing with henna designs on her hands, peeking from behind a window curtain embroidered with gold dragons.

Pic. 2d. Divan of Hafez, Celebration of ‘Id. c. 1527, private collection. Detail. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

Of particular interest to researchers are the privately-held works that are not currently available to the public at all, as well as those that are only in limited professional publications as mere descriptions or, at best, as poor quality black-and-white photographs. The Welch Collection will be the only accessible repository where researchers can examine these objects in detail and in color. The beautiful Safavid album drawing below entitled Seated Girl, ca. 1600, is in a private collection in London (pic. 3). It is signed by Habib-allah of Mashhad, one of the artists in the court of Shah ‘Abbas the Great at Isfahan (Iran), and is an example of Habib-allah’s “faultless line,” and the elegant, flowing ease of the Safavid drawings [1].

 

Ink drawing of a young woman seated outdoors on the ground, beneath orange and purple clouds. Possibly holding a pear. A shawl over her head and shoulders is held in place by a red headband decorated with a black feather just above the forehead. The figure is drawn in contour lines with light touch, while heavier ink highlights the face, eyebrows, and long wavy sidelocks.

Pic. 3. Habib-allah of Mashhad,  Seated Girl. c. 1600, private collection. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

While our Welch Collection holds only one, full view, digital representation of Seated Girl, another picture from a private collection in Cambridge, MA, entitled Chinese Ladies in a French Chateau Garden, has twelve associated detailed images. Indeed, this painting abounds in different subjects scattered all over that warrant a closer look. Painted in the early 1800s in India, it is attributed, at least partially, to a Mewar artist Chokha and, according to Andrew Topsfield, represents “an anthology of borrowed European and Far Eastern themes, deriving from French fashion prints and mid-18th century Chinese export paintings …” [2]. A single low-resolution full view of this painting is featured in Topsfield’s paper (pic. 4a), but it is Welch’s collection that lets you explore it closer in twelve hi-resolution images of details (pic. 4b-d).

 

Two ladies in a French garden, standing near a black table with a blue-and-white porcelain vase. One figure holds a flower pot and another a round Chinese fan. A chateau is seen in the background.

Pic. 4a. Chokha (attr.), Chinese ladies in French chateau garden. Early 19th century, Mewar, Rajasthan (India). Private collection, Cambridge, MA. Photo: Artibus Asiae.

 

Tree with pink flowers against rolling blue hills. A small white dragon curls around a branch looking down on a temple.

Pic. 4b. Chokha (attr.), Chinese ladies in French chateau garden. Early 19th century, Mewar, Rajasthan (India). Private collection, Cambridge, MA. Detail. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

Europeans in 18th century fashion, walking among flower beds.

Pic. 4c. Chokha (attr.), Chinese ladies in French chateau garden. Early 19th century, Mewar, Rajasthan (India). Private collection, Cambridge, MA. Detail. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

A blue-and-white porcelain vase with curved handles and golden lid. The design on the vase depicts a European couple with dog.

Pic. 4d. Chokha (attr.), Chinese ladies in French chateau garden. Early 19th century. Mewar, Rajasthan (India). Private collection, Cambridge, MA. Detail. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

A popular image of Shah Jahan on the Peacock Throne exists in several versions, one of which is in a private collection. This particular painting with its beautiful margins featuring botanicals and birds is available through Wikimedia, but despite of its large size its details fall far behind the ones from of the Welch Collection (pic. 5b-d).

 

Two fowl birds, each in its own frame of dark twigs against gold background, looking at each other.

Pic. 5a. Shah Jahan on the Peacock Throne. 1634–1635, India, private collection. Detail. Photo: Wikimedia.

 

High quality image of same bird painting revealing white spotted chest feathers , yellow eyes, rough paper texture, and other details.

Pic. 5b. Shah Jahan on the Peacock Throne. 1634–1635, India, private collection. Detail. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

Finally, we would like to share with you a preparatory study titled Four Views of a Baby Elephant at Play from Stuart Cary Welch’s own private collection (pic. 6a-c). As a symbol of intellectual and mental strength in Hinduism and the Indian culture, elephants were a popular subject in Indian art. This baby elephant adorned with golden bells is painted with realism and grace characteristic of the Kotah drawing masters.

 

Four views of a cheerful gray baby elephant against a yellow background; three kneeling and one standing on hind legs, arranged in a circle. The elephant wears gold bells dangling off a thin white collar. Two small figures, possibly trainers, lunge in opposite directions in top right corner.

Pic. 6a. Four Views of a Baby Elephant at Play. c. 1720–1730, Rajasthan, Kota (India). Full view. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

Contour line drawing of lunging male figure with hands spread apart, wearing cloth around his waist. There’s a hint of light red on his undergarments and turban.

Pic. 6b. Four Views of a Baby Elephant at Play. c. 1720–30, Rajasthan, Kota (India). Detail. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

Profile of baby elephant with chin bristles, wrinkles in skin of extended trunk, and a pink tongue in a smiling mouth.

Pic. 6c. Four Views of a Baby Elephant at Play. c. 1720–30, Rajasthan, Kota (India). Detail. Photo: Welch Collection.

 

To browse rare images from private collections assembled by Stuart Cary Welch, go to images.harvard.edu and in Advanced Search set Image Repository to “private collection” and Keyword Anywhere to “Welch”.

In subsequent blog posts in this series, we will continue talking about the different categories of images that one can find in the collection. As we continue to catalog these exciting (and open access!) images, we hope that whenever you search our collection, you will find just what you were looking for!

 

[1] Robinson, B. W. Picture Book of Persian Paintings. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1965, p. 17.

[2] Topsfield, Andrew. “Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar.” Artibus Asiae. Supplementum, Vol. 44, Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar (2002), p. 230.

 

 

Announcement: Explore our Stuart Cary Welch Islamic & South Asian Photograph Collection!

January 3, 2019 / / 0 Comments

You’re invited to share in a project with us here at the Harvard Fine Arts Library: a digital humanities game using images of Islamic and South Asian art, with the chance to win an art publication of your choice, worth up to $150 USD!

For more information about The Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection, see the collection page on our website. The collection consists mostly of high-definition photographs of paintings and drawings, both famous and rare, but it also contains images of historical photographs, metalwork, and architecture.

The game is easy! Just register, then click through the images and add tags, separated by commas. Keywords are fine, but the most important details would be any deeper knowledge you can impart (language, style, rough time period/era, story/text identification, motifs, techniques, artist, repository, etc.)

At the end of each round, the participants will be entered into a drawing to win an art book of their choice valued up to $150 USD. NOTE: you do need to register for an account and play the game at least once in order to be entered into the prize drawing!! 

 

Register HERE (you’ll need to confirm your email)

…then access the game HERE!

 

The theme for this month is: 

The Natural World: Indian & Islamic Paintings and Drawings

 

 

A little taste of themes to come (new rounds will be announced on our Instagram page, @harvardfineartslibrary, so give us a follow!):

The Supernatural World (paintings and drawings)

The Real World (historical and architectural photographs)

Challenge round (Difficult! Metalwork, frontispieces, etc.)

 

Thanks so much, and we hope you enjoy exploring this exciting collection! If you don’t mind, we’d love your feedback after playing, which you can give via the short form here: https://goo.gl/forms/RLxkvvtmEc0d8A3c2. Have fun!

Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection – Pt. 3

January 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

 

This post is the third in a series about the Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection written by the project’s staff and student catalogers in the Digital Images and Slides Collections of the Fine Arts Library.
Written by Logan Heiman

The Stuart Cary Welch South Asian Photograph Collection is a collection of over 60,000 35mm slide images of Islamic and Indian art, which documents artworks from the most prominent civilizations in the Islamicate world spanning the deserts of Uzbekistan all the way through to the Himalayas and onward to the Indian subcontinent. The credit for this collection belongs to its namesake. Stuart Cary Welch made use of his far-flung connections and influence as a renowned curator and art historian to document previously difficult-to-access artworks produced over the course of a millennium. While the Welch collection encompasses artworks of various forms and media in addition to architectural works, painted manuscripts constitute the heart of its contents.

Under the Mughal emperors such as Akbar (reigned 1556–1605), Jahangir (reigned 1605–1627), and Shah Jahan (reigned 1605–1627), royal patronage of the arts produced a great number of paintings, poetry, and exquisite manuscripts chronicling the sumptuous wealth and splendor of the court with its attendant rituals and ceremonies. Such manuscripts displayed the cosmopolitanism and erudition of the emperors for whom they were commissioned. This was also a golden age for Mughal architecture, particularly under Shah Jahan, who commissioned several large monuments including Taj Mahal.[i]

 

 

This detached folio from the Jahangirnameh (Memoirs of Jahangir) in the Aga Khan Museum depicts Jahangir appearing before his subjects from a jharoka, or balcony during the darshan ceremony, evoking the royal style of Hindu kings. The darshan ceremony, initiated by Akbar during his reign, emphasized the illuminating power of the emperor through ritual performance.[ii]

 

 

Other images convey not only the trappings of imperial wealth in the Mughal court, but also the social arrangements and hierarchy by which the emperor distinguished himself from the nobles and the nobles from the largely Hindu subjects of the empire. Take the example of this painting at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, depicting the Emperor Jahangir in the midst of a darbar. A darbar served an array of purposes including formal discussions of affairs of state and royal ceremonies. Here, Jahangir is seen in an audience hall surrounded by his son Prince Khurram (Shah Jahan) and grandson Prince Shah Shuja, along with courtiers. The position of the courtiers flanking the emperor denotes their privileged status following the strict protocol governing such ceremonies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet another defining feature of Mughal paintings is their striking realism. A painting from the Johnson Album housed in the British Library exemplifies the commitment of commissioned artists to extraordinary detail and naturalism. Jahangir championed this particular style, as reflected in this painting that depicts a hunter scaling a tree. The hunter, whose eyes are set on squirrels high up in the branches, is at the bottom of the tall tree with no shoes. His expression is determined and his right foot is already in climbing action. But, the squirrels above already know that he has no chance. They are going on with their usual business, ignoring the man below. The depictions of squirrels show that the artist spent quite a long time studying them, such that he could accurately capture their busy activities and movements during the autumn season.

 

 

 

 

 

The aforementioned images provide just a small glimpse of the artwork documented by Stuart Cary Welch during his long, path-breaking career. Works from the Mughal Empire have been showcased here, and future blog posts will cover the many other empires and societies in which these artworks were generated.

 

[i] Mughal Empire on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire (retrieved on 11/27/17)

[ii] Jahangir at the jharoka window of the Agra Fort, folio from Jahangirnameh (Memoirs of Jahangir) from Aga Khan Museum’s website: https://www.agakhanmuseum.org/collection/artifact/jahangir-jharoka-window-agra-fort-folio-jahangirnameh-memoirs-jahangir (retrieved on 11/27/17)

 

There will be an exhibit of the Welch Collection images at the Fine Arts Library at Littauer Center from January 22, 2018.

Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection – Pt. 2

October 30, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Written by Bronwen Gulkis

This post is the second in a series about the Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection written by the project’s staff and student catalogers in the Digital Images and Slides Collections of the Fine Arts Library.

Slides on the light table

Before the widespread availability of high-quality digital images, patrons at the Fine Arts Library viewed images on 35mm film slides, strips of developed film housed in a lightweight metal, plastic, or paper frame. These could be viewed through a slide projector, or at a light table–the Fine Arts Library still has some of these tables in our Lamont location. The library also has over 607,000 slides left from these days, and most scholars and professionals would have kept their own image collections as well. However, this was not always the case. Stuart Cary Welch, the former curator of Indian and Later Islamic art at Harvard, owned a collection of approximately 65,000 slides, which he left to the Fine Arts Library. In a memorial essay for Martin Dickson, “Salute to a Coauthor,” Welch later recalled that when he began amassing his slides, a colleague of his “spurned their use as not quite honorable, akin to cheating at cards.”[1] However unorthodox his methods may have been at the time, they were eventually adopted across the field of Islamic and Indian art.

Like any analogue technology, the clarity and resolution of 35mm slides was dependent on the type of film used and the developing technique. Most of the Stuart Cary Welch collection was photographed on Kodachrome, a proprietary film and emulsion technique owned by Kodak and popular throughout the 20th century. Kodachrome was prized for its archival qualities, since the color dye was added to the film surface in layers during the developing process, allowing for greater clarity, nuance, and pigment stability. However, like all archival materials, slide images degrade over time. The Fine Arts Library staff and our team of photographers has been working to preserve these images by re-photographing the physical slide, and then editing this digital image to restore and their original color balance.

Slides also fostered a unique collaborative way of working. Welch recalled that Martin Dickson, a professor of Persian Studies at Princeton, “underwent trial by color slide” in 1960 upon first visiting the Welch residence to discuss the project that became The Houghton Shahnama.[2]  Veterans of the Fine Arts Library will recall a time when professors prepared for their lectures by sorting slides side by side on a light table and loading them into a carousel. Welch collected images from across America, Europe, the Middle East, and India, and then manually reconstructed manuscripts and artistic communities by grouping dispersed images in the same carousels. As we inventory Welch’s slides, we often come across these carousels, filled with images from his publications and lectures.

Today, it is so easy to access high-quality digital images that we forget the meticulous processes that earlier scholars went through to assemble their image collections. Now that 35mm slide technology is no longer in use, these slides become artifacts of a formative period in the discipline of art history. Our next post will cover some of the treasures of this exciting research collection.

 

 

 

[1] Welch, Stuart Cary. “Salute To A Coauthor: Martin Bernard Dickson”. In Intellectual Studies On Islam: Essays Written In Honor Of Martin B. Dickson, 9. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1990, 9.

[2] Welch 1990, 14.

 

Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection: Part I

September 19, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This post is the first in a series about the Stuart Cary Welch Islamic and South Asian Photograph Collection written by the project’s staff and student catalogers in the Digital Images and Slides Collections of the Fine Arts Library.

Written by Alejandra Dean

In the basement of Lamont Library, a little-known collection is poised to make big contributions to the field of art history. Behind the neatly stacked boxes of microfilm reels and shelves of government documents lining the library’s D-level, a small, tucked-away office provides access to some of the world’s most treasured artworks. Beginning in May of 2017, Lamont’s Room D-10 was transformed to accommodate a collection of over 60,000 35mm slide images of Islamic and Indian art. The collection totals enough to fit 60 small moving boxes and previously belonged to the eminent 20th century scholar Stuart Cary Welch. Cary Welch’s slides were donated to Harvard as part of his estate in 2014, and now a team of students and library staff are working together to unveil this hidden legacy to a larger global audience.

This post inaugurates a new blog series written by the Welch project’s staff and student catalogers. Posts will contextualize how such a unique corpus of images made its way to the Harvard Fine Arts Library and will provide insight into what it’s like to prepare 65,000 slides for a new virtual existence online. To date, upwards of 10,000 Welch slides have already been scanned and published as digital images free to browse and download on Artstor.

But before we start taking a behind-the-scenes look at this process, it’s important to shed some light on the project’s raison d’être: Stuart Cary Welch himself. Known for his role as a curator at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art (from 1979-1987) and Harvard’s Fogg Museum (from 1956-1995), Cary Welch was one of the first art historians in the United States to promote the study of Islamic and Indian art. In his own words:

“Because no courses in Persian or Indian painting were given at Harvard (or elsewhere) during the 1950s, my path to knowledge was autodidactive, through travel and study of collections. This enjoyable program was catalyzed by building an archive of 35mm Kodachrome slides, oddly an innovative practice at that time.”[1]

It may or may not have come as a surprise to Welch, then, that his ‘innovative practice’ would become internationally mainstream over the next few decades. During the second half of the 20th century, university art history departments adopted the use of slides as a pedagogical tool. When digital media replaced analog image technology in the 1990s, these pre-information age collections started to take on new didactic roles beyond the classroom. So what exactly are 35mm slides, how were they used, and why are they important today? Our next post will more closely examine this fascinating film format.

[1] Cary Welch, Stuart. 1990. “Salute To A Coauthor: Martin Bernard Dickson”. In Intellectual Studies On Islam: Essays Written In Honor Of Martin B. Dickson, 9. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press.

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