Inspired by the painting The White Slave featured in the exhibition Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, curator John Henry Rice will lead a gallery talk focusing on painted portraits in the museum’s South Asian collection. Such portraiture became widespread during the reign of the Mughals and was itself largely a product of foreign artistic ideas. From the time of the tradition’s inception, its creators engaged and grappled with multiple modes of representation—Indian, Persian, and European. Cultural collisions, fusions, and tensions around the differing visual languages of power only escalated through the colonial period.
Portrait of Muhammad Safdar 'Ali Khan of Rampu', 1863/64, Babu Mangal Sen, opaque watercolor on paper. Friends of Indian Art © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Cost: Free, no reservations required
3 in 30: Cultural Crosscurrents in South Asian Portraiture
with Dr. John Henry Rice E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art
Tue, Aug 2, 11–11:30 am & Thu, Aug 4, 6:30–7 pm
Meet at Visitor Services Desk