The Soane Museum Study Group is an open forum for scholars – both established and emerging – to present new research into an aspect of architectural history and/or Soane’s collection.
Ursula Weekes - World in Motion: Two Eighteenth-Century Indian Albums and their Journey to Sir John Soane's Collection
In the 1820s, Sir John Soane acquired two remarkable albums of Indian and Persian calligraphy and painting. The first, known as the Lord Berwick Album, originally belonged to the renowned eighteenth-century Mughal Historian Ghulam Hussein Khan, while the second was compiled for Sir Elijah Impey, First Chief Justice of Bengal for the East India Company in the 1780s but only bound as an album in England in the 1810s. Both albums contain rare specimens of calligraphy and exquisite paintings, but their configurations mark important contrasts between Islamicate and Western forms of knowledge. This lecture delves into the contents, situates the albums within connected intellectual cultures of cosmopolitan elites and traces their histories from India to England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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About the speaker
Dr Ursula Weekes is an independent art historian and expert on Mughal and Rajput art, based in London. She teaches in a variety of museum, university and school settings and is a freelance academic cataloguer for Sir John Soane Museum. Her book Mughal Court Painting (Reaktion Books Ltd) will be forthcoming in 2024.
Visitor information
On arrival, please come to no. 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and give your name. The door will be staffed from 6.00pm.