The Witsen Album with 49 miniatures of rulers  1686

Witsen’s collection included this album of portraits of successive rulers of the Mughal dynasty. For Witsen, the portraits were a source of knowledge about India’s history. He even had the Persian inscriptions translated by Hendrick Francken, a Protestant minister who had been [br]posted in Smyrna (now Izmir) for many years. The little portraits were made in Golconda, wher...