Paintings from the personal collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan: ‘Anyone with an eye will fall in love with them’

It was in 1998, in the Princes, Poets and Paladins exhibition at the British Museum, that the public first caught a glimpse of a priceless collection of Indian and Islamic paintings owned by Prince Sadruddin and Princess Catherine Aga Khan. Amassed over 45 years, the 140 paintings, drawings and manuscripts, dating from the 14th century, were of exceptional beauty and vigour.

‘It would be impossible to form such a collection today,’ says Edward Wilkinson, Christie’s global head of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art. ‘Prince Sadruddin began acquiring these works in the 1960s, when fine examples of Indian and Islamic art were still easily available on the market.’

Born in France in 1933, the philanthropist and United Nations diplomat Prince Sadruddin was the younger son of Sultan Muhammed Shah, Aga Khan III, the leader of the Nizari Ismaili Shia dynasty. His grandmother was a descendant of Fath Ali Shah Qajar, the second Shah of Qajar Iran, through whom the family inherited a library of Persian books, mystical texts and astrological treatises.

As a child, Prince Sadruddin was captivated by the luminosity of these manuscripts, and fascinated by the inventiveness and delightful complexity of the paintings by master craftsmen.

At Harvard in the 1950s, Prince Sadruddin came into contact with Islamic scholars and classicists who guided his interests. He also solicited advice from his peers, among them Stuart Cary Welch, who later became an internationally renowned Islamic art expert. ‘In those days, Islamic art was a neglected field, so you could pick up a good page of Kufik calligraphy, an Islamic script, for less than $100,’ recalled Prince Sadruddin.

When the prince married Princess Catherine in 1972, the couple began collecting in earnest, filling their beautiful 17th-century chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva with exquisite examples of textiles, rugs and paintings from Persia and India. Artworks from the Pahari hills and the Deccan and Safavid courts were selected for their beauty and symbolism.

What makes an art collection more than the sum of its parts? ‘The rare and unusual,’ says Wilkinson. ‘The prince and princess never followed a set of rules of sticking to genres or specific periods — they acquired what resonated with them personally.’

Over the years, the collection acquired a kind of reverence among scholars of Islamic and Indian art, becoming a reference point for academics and auction houses. ‘We’ve grown used to using the Aga Khan collection as a touchpoint for exceptionalism,’ says Wilkinson, ‘so this is a big moment in auction history, and highly anticipated. There is no better collection anywhere in the world.’

On 28 October 2025, Christie’s will offer Exceptional Paintings from the Personal Collection of Prince & Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, a group of 95 works by or attributed to such celebrated artists as Dust Muhammad, Basawan, Ghulam Ali Khan, Bishan Singh and Reza Abbasi. ‘It is hard not to be dazzled by these paintings,’ says the historian William Dalrymple in the video above. ‘Anyone with an eye will fall in love with them.’

Edward Wilkinson’s highlights from the Personal Collection of Prince & Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan

Illustrations to a Rasikapriya, circa 1770-80

Painted in unusual pale, silvery colours, these Pahari pictures detail the Hindu epic poem Rasikapriya, which was a popular theme in 18th-century India. The story of the bereft nayika, waiting for her lover, is told with a remarkable degree of movement and elegance. ‘The artist has used the metaphor in one page of the silver moon, and the mist in the background amplifies her desolation,’ says Wilkinson.

Pahari painting evolved in the sub-Himalayan valleys of Himachal Pradesh, where Hindu courts preserved their political independence throughout the Mughal period. ‘Behind each illustration there is a hidden meaning — the struggle between good and evil, the secrets of the universe, the meaning of life and death,’ said Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan in 1998.

Maharao Umed Singh and Zalim Singh Hunting Tigers, 1781

‘You can almost feel the noise pulsing from the page,’ says Wilkinson of this painting of a tiger hunt by the celebrated master of the Kotah school, Shaykh Taju. ‘The palpable danger of the hunt at its most thrilling. There is something strangely metaphysical, if not surreal, about the atmosphere.’ The blood-red sky, the spiky jungle canopy, three-dimensional tree trunks, and the oversized tigers tearing at the branches are tightly packed into an almost unreadable composition.

‘Traditionally, the maharaja would have been at the centre of the picture, but here he is on the far side and the tigers dominate. It shows Taju’s reverence for these magnificent animals,’ says the specialist.

A Prince Hawking, circa 1610

Mughal art originated in 14th-century Persia. However, it is widely agreed that its golden age was achieved in the Punjab between the mid-16th and 17th centuries, when there was a vibrant cross-cultural exchange of ideas.

Wilkinson says that this painting of a prince hawking, attributed to the enigmatic painter Muhammad Ali, is the best-known example: ‘The face of the prince is shown in three-quarter detail, which is purely Persian; but the horse, with its distinctive character, is unmistakably Indian.’ The illustration has an unstoppable energy, conveyed through the liveliness of the horse, the vibrant orange and gold of the prince’s turban and robes, and the highly complex floral designs.

Ummee Chund in the uniform of Skinner’s Horse, 1819

‘He really is the most handsome fellow,’ says Wilkinson of this striking portrait of one of the most charismatic figures of the British Raj. Ummee Chund was an officer in the Skinner’s Horse regiment of the Indian Army, and he saved the life of Major William Fraser in Panipat on 18 March 1819.

Here, he is every inch the hero, painted with great attention to detail, as is typical of the Company School style. Company pictures were watercolours commissioned by Europeans from local artists to capture the people and places they encountered in India.

Colonel Polier’s nautch, probably 1774-75

Colonel Polier was a Swiss-French adventurer and engineer who came to India to make his fortune and left with an outstanding collection of Deccani and Mughal art. Like many European interlopers in the 18th century, this son of a humble pastor took advantage of the hybrid culture found in northern India to create a new identity for himself and a lifestyle to go with it.

Here he is depicted by the celebrated Mughal painter Mihr Chand, seated on a yellow settee smoking a waterpipe and watching a nautch (traditional dance). Polier did not do so well when he went back to Europe. On his return to France in 1792 — a supremely bad moment in French history to become a pretending aristocrat — he bought a vast chateau near Avignon, and was murdered by robbers three years later.

Offered on 28 October 2025, Exceptional Paintings from the Personal Collection of Prince & Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan is on view 24-27 October at Christie’s in London. Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds including Rugs and Carpets takes place on 30 October, with viewing 25-29 October