Celebrated filmmaker James Ivory on his Indian miniatures

A preface to the exhibition of Indian miniatures in London by celebrated filmmaker James Ivory:

The first film I ever made, in 1956, was a documentary about Venice and the many artists who had painted her. In the course of making this film, I came to admire Venetian painter Canaletto's etchings of the city. Hoping to find one, I went to see a print dealer in San Francisco named Raymond Lewis. I had not been told that he also dealt in Indian miniature paintings.

On the day we met, Lewis had been showing his stock of Indian pictures to a buyer; they were still spread around his gallery when I came in. Years later, when I thought back on that afternoon, I would wonder: what if I had turned up slightly later and he had time to put his pictures away? Had I even passed the unknown buyer on the stairs as I went up? Everyone's life history is made up of such possibilities, for better or worse. Love, murder, passions, like collecting, start in this way.

I had never seen an Indian miniature painting before. I knew very little about India apart from the intoxicating memory of the country I had taken away after seeing Jean Renoir's film The River two or three years before. Some of the radiant scenes from the world created by Renoir, starting with a jewel-like dancing Krishna and Radha, now seemed to be lying in front of me in Lewis's show-room, and could be picked up and held in my hand.

As I moved from picture to picture, taken from a manuscript painted in 18th-century Delhi called Ragamala, I forgot that other 18th-century world of Canaletto and entered the one of Indian miniature painting. What were the stories these little scenes were telling? There were many moods, some inexplicable: a dark-skinned, half-dressed woman wearing a skirt of leaves sitting under a tree in communion with some friendly snakes; an embracing couple sitting in a swing in a downpour; a man with a donkey's head like Shakespeare's Bottom listening attentively to someone sitting above him on a throne.

On the spot, possibly rashly, I decided to make a film about this new world I had come across so unexpectedly. Also, on the spot, I bought two of the pages from Ragamala, and so this collection began.

(courtesy: The Francesca Galloway Gallery, London)