FOGG MUSEUM ACQUIRES OLD SPECIMENS OF ORIENTAL ART

The Fogg Museum of Fine Arts has recently acquired for its Oriental Department a fine painting of the Tosa School; dating probably from the fifteenth century. The painting represents a daimio on horseback, and near him a standing and a seated figure. The picture is drawn in black on a paper probably once white but now gray in tone. There are slight touches of red in the trappings of the horse and the dress of the figures. The composition is of the simplest, the drawing spirited and sure. It is interesting to note that the picture is remarkably close to a recent purchase of the Louvre, attributed to Mitsunobu (1433-1525) and published in "Le Musee du Louvre depuis 1914, Dons, Legs et Acquisitions", issued in 1919.

Other important acquisitions in the Department are three Indian portrait miniatures of the Mughal School of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, the gift of Mr. Denman W. Ross.

In writing of Indian drawings Dr. Coomaraswamy has said that the keynote of Mughal art of this period is its profound interest in individual character. The portraits "bring before us the form and features of nearly every notable person in India for more than two centuries."

The Fogg Museum miniatures are fine character delineations and are beautiful in design and execution, with simple, rhythmic drawing and the rejection of the unessential, a characteristic of the School.