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DECEMBER, 1911.) INDIAN PAINTING AT FESTIVAL OF EMPIRE
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Mrs. Herringham's informal observations, while sufficient to call attention to many matters deserving of close study, are obviously far from constituting a complete critique, even if read with her earlier and almost equally informal contribution to the Burlington Magazine. Considering that the Ajanta frescoes are the most important series of ancient paintings extant, with the exception of those at Pompeii, it is lamentable that no good account of them exists. Dr. Burgess did what he could to describe them in his Notes published in 1879, and that work is still the most systematic description of the paintings. But it is very meagre and illustrated only by outline sketches. Mr. Griffiths' fine volumes of reproductions published by the India Office, although containing much valuable description and criticism, are very far from furnishing A complete treatise on the subject.
A large part of the pictures desoribed by Burgess and Griffiths has disappeared since they wrote, and each year the task of composing an adequate account of the frescoes becomes more difficult. Mrs. Herringham's notes add much to our knowledge of the subject, while leaving ample room for more exhaustive treatment, and all students of Indian art should be grateful to her for her disinterested labours. She has generously presented her copies to the. India Society,' small association recently formed for the purpose of studying and encouraging Indian art. The Society has at present no rooms of its own, and will, I presume, deposit Mrs. Herringham's valuable gift in some public institution. Her copies, being to some small extent restorations, are far more pleasing and easily intelligible than the more rigidly accurate facsimiles of earlier copyists.
We are, I fear, still unlikely to see for a long time yet a worthy Indian Museum established and properly administered in London. So far as I know, nothing has been done to carry out the project of such a museum, which has been freely talked about. If such an 'institution ever comes into being, Mrs. Herringham's gift to the Indian Society should form one of the choicest treasures of the collection.
A large series of one hundred photographs taken during last winter (apparently 1910-11] by M. Victor Golobew of Paris was exhibited as Nos. 307-310 in the Indian Court. These excellent photographs of the Ajanta frescoes should be stndied in connexion with Mrs. Herringham's copies, and it is desirable that sets of them should be acquired by the Indian Museum, Calcutta, and the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Specimens from Dr. Stein's Collection of Ancient Buddhist Pictures and Embroideries discovered at a site near Tun-huang, on the western confines
of the Chinese Province of Kan-84.
Four large cases in the Indian Court were filled with seleot specimens from the large collection made at Tun-huang which is the joint property of the Government of India and the Trustees of the British Museum. The art objects and an extensive library comprising many thousands of manuscripts in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, old Turkish, and other languages came to light by the accidental discovery of a small walled-up chapel in one of the many cave-temples known collectively as 'the Halls of the Thousand Buddhas.' Conclusive evidence proves that the chapel was walled op very early in the eleventh century. Nothing, consequently, can be later than A. D. 1020. As a matter of fact, most of the oontents of the chamber are much older, dating from the time of the Tang Dynasty, that is to say,
