A Secret Garden

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Danielle Porret’s passion for Asian art and for Indian painting in particular was inflamed when she attended classes on Asian mythology during her studies at Geneva University. It intensified further when in 1966 she visited an exhibition in London of Indian paintings collected by Mildred and William Archer, curators of Indian art at the British India office and the Victoria & Albert Museum respectively. A conference interpreter by profession, Porret began to study the collections of Asian art at London’s great museums and the technique of paper restoration. And she started to buy Indian paintings herself. Danielle Porret’s collection comprises outstanding works spanning seven centuries from the time of the Sultans (1206–1526) through to the nineteenth century. While many museums house representative art-historical inventories, Porret describes her collection as a “secret garden” compiled on the basis of her own personal taste. The new book A Secret Garden features 105 paintings from Porret’s collection. The essays are contributed by leading experts in the area of Indian painting: B.N. Goswamy (Pahari painting), Jeremiah P. Losty (the painting of Rajasthan and central India), and John Seyller (Mogul- und Dekkan painting, as well as the painting from the time of the Sultans). The book is published to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich in spring 2014.