A. K. Coomaraswamy

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) was one of the most influential historians, collectors and theorists of South Asian art, especially pertaining to India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Trained as a geologist, he advocated for subjective methods of knowing and collecting artistic heritage, which he developed through a critique of the colonial-archaeological methods of studying art. By the 1900s he had started his personal collection of art, which included paintings, drawings, objects and sculptures. He collected for public institutions and exhibitions as well, such as the United Provinces Exhibition at Allahabad (now Prayagraj) in 1910. He offered his own collection to set up a national museum in India, but it was not taken up. Eventually, he left for the United States of America, becoming the first Keeper of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in 1917 after selling most of his collection to Denman Waldo Ross, a benefactor of the MFA.

Working as a curator at the museum, he wrote catalogue descriptions and scholarly publications on Indian art and sculpture—making his collection possibly the most significant one in the understanding of Indian art globally. His definitive Catalogue of the Indian Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was published in five volumes from 1923 to 1930. Described as '(o)ne of the oldest and most encyclopedic collections of Indian art in the United States', the Boston MFA’s collection of early Buddhist sculptures, Mughal and Rajput miniature paintings and archaeological artefacts—such as those he helped collect at Chanhu Daro in the late 1930s—was largely built by Coomaraswamy. He also gifted works to other museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum. A collection of his voluminous publications is also held by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA)

Leonard Elmhirst

Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) was an educationist and agricultural scientist who worked closely with Rabindranath Tagore on his rural re-development projects at Surul, near his newly established educational institute at Santiniketan. This would plant the seed for the Rural Reconstruction Department at Sriniketan. Tagore met Elmhirst when he was in New York in 1920 and invited him to work together, beginning a lifelong friendship. Elmhirst would also accompany the poet on his travels to China, Japan and Argentina. Eventually, he left for Britain to start his own alternative rural cooperative at Dartington Hall in South Devon under the advice and approval of Tagore. Elmhirst would describe it as 'not unlike a mingling of Santiniketan and Sriniketan'. Tagore is known to have gifted seventeen (in some accounts, twelve) of his own works to the Dartington Trust and made several sketches and paintings while he was visiting the estates in 1930—possibly gifting some of these to the Elmhirst children, William and Ruth. These formed a significant archive of Tagore’s paintings in Europe until the 2000s when most of them were auctioned off, bringing newfound value to the poet’s artistic works as well.  

W. G. Archer

William G. Archer (1907-1979) worked as a British civil servant in India, during which time he also collected and wrote about the artistic heritage of the subcontinent, focusing on and creating a global taste for Kalighat paintings, miniature paintings from Rajasthan, Punjab and Kangra, Indian modern art as well as folk and tribal traditions of art among others. Following Indian Independence in 1947 and his retirement in England, he served as the Keeper of the Indian Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1949 to 1959. In his writings he tried to make formal or theoretical connections across different categories of art that he collected or was inspired by. For instance, he collected Mithila paintings and wrote about its affinities with the modern works of Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. His wife, Mildred Archer, was a major art historian of Company and miniature paintings and some of her books, like Indian Popular Painting in the India Office Library (1977), contain large samples of the works collected by the couple in India.

Archer’s life and career is a gateway towards discovering a network of Indian art collectors who were active at the time and were his friends—such as Gopi Krishna Kanoria, who held a major collection of Indian miniatures at Patna, and Rai Krishna Dasa, founder of the art museum at Banaras Hindu University and the Bharat Kala Bhavan. In their monographs, both William and Mildred Archer frequently name other collectors whose practices inspired their own and who provided information about works they collected. Writing about one such collector, Professor Ishwari Prasad, Mildred Archer notes, “…it is largely through his memory of his grandfather and great-uncle and the stories repeated by them that the oral tradition has survived. Moreover, a number of existing paintings owe their preservation to his family collection, and much accurate attribution of particular paintings has proved possible through his precise recollections.” From his own writings and those of others like Stuart Cary Welch, it is clear that Archer maintained a great collection of artworks at his home as well that included 'tribal woodcarvings, miniatures and contemporary paintings' that were accessible to visiting friends and scholars.

Stella Kramrisch

Stella Kramrisch (1896-1993), was a curator, critic, and art-historian specialising in Indian art. While teaching Indian Art at Oxford University post World War I, she met Rabindranath Tagore who invited her to teach at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan. Kramrisch taught there from 1921 and started collecting the local folk arts which included scrolls and textiles. In 1923, Kramrisch began teaching at the University of Calcutta, where she advised her student Devaprasad Ghosh on the organisation of university students to collect examples of ‘folk art’ from the villages around Calcutta (now Kolkata) which eventually formed the collection at Sir Asutosh Mukherjee Museum in the University. Similarities between the pieces in this museum and Kramrisch’s personal collection suggests that this effort also helped her add to her own collection. Kramrisch travelled extensively across India for her research and amassed a collection of temple sculptures unrivalled by any collection outside of India. In 1931, she sent most of her collection on long-term loan to England, mainly to the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

In 1950, Kramrisch moved to Philadelphia and joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Soon after, her personal collection of Indian temple sculpture went on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where in 1954 she became the first curator of Indian art. In 1956, she facilitated the sale of her personal collection to the Museum and installed the museum’s first South Asian art gallery. Kramrisch continued to collect throughout her life and at the time of her death in 1993, her bequest to the Philadelphia Museum of Art included over 700 objects. Her personal collection has formed the basis for more than twenty thematic exhibitions, including landmark exhibitions like Unknown India, curated with artist Haku Shah, Manifestations of Shiva, and Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz and the Stella Kramrisch Collections .