INDIA, MUGHAL, CIRCA 1740-50

The Read Album of Mughal paintings previously belonged to Sir Charles Hercules Read, Keeper of British and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum. The Pierpont Morgan library acquired thirty folios from the album in 1911 and the remaining forty-eight known pages are widely dispersed. While the identity of the album's compiler remains unknown, many borders date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, indicating that this was the time at which the album was originally compiled. The pages were likely held together in several lacquered bindings.