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The National Art Library and the Indian Collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Jan van der Wateren
Jan van der Wateren*
Affiliation:
National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
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Abstract

The V&A Museum possesses the largest collection of Indian art outside the Indian sub-continent, dating from the acquisition of items from the Great Exhibition and of collections acquired by the Honourable East India Company. The Nehru Gallery of Indian Art, which opened in 1990, enabled a great deal of this material to be displayed. The Indian Collection is served by its own small research library, the records of which are currently being incorporated in the catalogue of the National Art Library at the Museum, while the National Art Library itself provides scholarly material on Indian art, especially the fine and decorative arts, in the major European languages. Some sources for obtaining new publications from India are noted.

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , 1993 , pp. 20 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 1993

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References

Notes

1 Quoted in: Guy, John and Swallow, Deborah: Arts of India: 1550-1990. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1990, p.9.Google Scholar

2 A history of the Society can be found in Kerawal, O. P. The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the discovery of India’s past, 1784-1838. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar

3 For a full description of the history of the Collection see Skelton, Robert ‘The Indian Collections: 1798 to 1978’. In The Burlington Magazine, vol. 102, no. 902, May 1978, pp.297–304.Google Scholar

4 The historical associations to this object is described, alongside many others, in Cocks, Anna Somers. The Victoria and Albert Museum: the making of the collection. Leicester: Windward, 1980.Google Scholar

5 A short history ‘The British Museum Library and the India Office’ by Use Sternberg appears in the British Library Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, Autumn 1991, pp.155–166.Google Scholar

6 Somers Cocks, op cit., p. 126.

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