Archive Item: Birds in a coconut grove
Leaf from the First or 'South Kensington' Baburnama

By the Mughal artists Miskina and Bhura
India, circa 1589 A.D.

Opaque watercolour on paper:

Page 244 by 156 mm page; 9 5/8 by 6 1/8 in.; miniature: 180 by 130 mm., 7 1/8 by 5 1/8 in.

Babur's memoirs are one of the greatest and most interesting of pre-modern autobiographical books. He records in detail not only the events of his own tumultuous life, but also his reactions on first coming to India into in 1526, and to its people, its flora and its fauna.

This manuscript was dispersed in a sale in 1913, but twenty folios are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Provenance

Manuscript dispersed in 1913
Mentioned in Ellen Smart (1977)
Private collection, England

Exhibited

Exhibited in Indian and Islamic Paintings and Manuscripts, Forge and Lynch Ltd., 9 East 82 Street, New York, NY10028, 14-20 March 2009

SOLD TO THE FREER-SACKLER GALLERY OF ART,
WASHINGTON, D.C.