Indian Painting in the Sarabhai Foundation

The paintings to which this volume serves as a catalogue belonged once to one or the other member of the Sarabhai family. But, compared to so many other distinguished collections which the family owned, and later gifted either to the Calico Museum of Textiles or the Sarabhai Foundation—of textiles, pichhwais, manuscripts, Jain artefacts, and south Indian bronzes, among them—they have remained little known till now. There is no dominant theme that runs through the collection, and paintings may not, by themselves, have been a dominant passion in the life of the Sarabhais. Still, the works they collected reflect excellent discrimination and aesthetic sensibility. Moreover, the collection boasts a remarkable breadth, and even the casual viewer would be struck by the well-rounded view it offers of the broad historical development of Indian painting.