Lot Essay
13-16 November 1789: Thomas Daniell commented:"The effect of this gate, at a distance, is grand...and its ornaments, though numerous, ...form the happiest union of beauty and grandeur". Hodges,who had already published a print of this 17th century mosque gate, was impressed by the similarity of contemporary expressions of Gothic and Indian art: "In this all the minor ornaments are the same...so that a person would almost be led to think that artists had arrived from the same school to the same place, to erect similar buildings at the extremity of India and of Europe"