The Minto Album

The Minto Album is one of three large surviving assemblages of Shah Jahan's albums, named after the Earl of Minto, Governor General of India from 1807 to 1813, when it may have been acquired. ¹ It was sold from the Minto collection at Sotheby's in 1925; of its forty double-sided pages, nineteen are in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, and the rest in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. ²

For Milo Cleveland Beach it holds a brilliant series of paintings with signatures or marginal attributions to almost every major painter of the period, inscriptions confirmed as reliable by comparison with other works, so its pages underpin his lists of authentic works. The Wantage and Kevorkian Albums, by contrast, mostly hold late paintings he dates to about 1800. ¹

They include Timur, Babur and Humayun by Govardhan; Prince Khurram in his twenty-fifth year by Abu'l Hasan; Shah Jahan in 1631 and Asaf Khan by Bichitr; Shah Jahan riding with Dara Shikoh by Govardhan; Dara Shikoh in 1645 by Chitarman; Malik Ambar by Hashim; and a Zebra by Mansur (1621). ^{2 3}