An Interest in Persian and Indian Art
Listen to co-curator Erica Ciallela describe Belle Greene’s acquisitions of Persian and Indian miniatures and hear actor Andi Bohs read a letter from Belle Greene to British Museum curator Charles Hercules Read.
THE READ ALBUM
One of the treasures Greene and Berenson saw in Munich was an album of Persian and Mughal paintings and calligraphy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The collection belonged to Charles Hercules Read, keeper of British and medieval antiquities at the British Museum. In 1911 Greene wrote to Read, a friend and colleague, to ask if the album was for sale, explaining her rationale for the acquisition. She noted that, despite Morgan’s minimal interest in Persian and Mughal art, “in a collection of manuscripts and drawings such as he has, it is very necessary for him to have a representation of this most important school.” Greene’s interest in collecting Islamic art, among peer institutions, was ahead of its time.
Ibrāhīm Adham of Balkh served by angels
Faizabad, Oudh, India, ca. 1750–75
The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, 1911; MS M.458, fol. 32r
ERICA: In 1910 Belle Greene and Bernard Berenson visited an important exhibition of Islamic art in Munich, Germany. There she saw an album of Persian and Mughal miniatures on loan from the collection of British Museum curator Charles Hercules Read. Greene corresponded with Read extensively and in this letter asked him about the album she saw in Munich.
ANDI:
My dear Mr. Read:
You will remember that when you were in America you told me that you might find it necessary to sell your collection of Persian drawings, which I remembered having seen in the Exhibition in Munich last summer, and which at the time I considered among the finest things in the Exhibition. I do not know whether you still desire to part with these drawings; but, in case you do, I want to ask you if you will not give Mr. Morgan the first opportunity of purchasing them. Unfortunately, Mr. Morgan himself is not particularly interested in Persian art; but it seems to me that, in a collection of manuscripts and drawings such as he has, it is very necessary for him to have a representation of this most important school, and I doubt if he would ever be able to find finer specimens than those which you are so lucky as to own.