100 Masterpieces: Mohammedan and Oriental

Many visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum will no doubt be glad to carry away with them some general record of the objects included in its various collections. A first attempt to select a hundred masterpieces from the whole wealth of the departments showed that this was an almost impossible task, and it was therefore decided to divide the available material into three groups of a hundred each, the first covering Early Christian and Medieval, the second renaissance and modern, and the third Mohammedan and Oriental art. The word masterpiece has been employed in a liberal sense to include as many as possible of those works of art in the museum which are at once beautiful, important and widely known. The choice among them has been exceedingly difficult, and has in some cases been guided by their suitability for reproduction on a small page. But it may be hoped that at any rate most of the outstanding treasures in the museum are illustrated in one or other of these little books. The first begins with the end of the fourth century after Christ and ends with the final manifestations of gothic art in the first half of the sixteenth century; among the earlier objects some few might no doubt equally well have been included as Mohammedan works of art in the third book. The second opens with the Florentine renaissance of the beginning of the fifteenth century and only ends with the close of the nineteenth. The third is confined to Mohammedan art in its fully developed phases and to the more easily separable arts of India and the far east. All these divisions are to some extent liable to overlap, the first two particularly so; but it would have been far more difficult to fix a precise limit of date between the two groups, and it is hoped that the classification will not be altogether an inconvenient one. Within each book the plates have been arranged as far as the balancing of the photographs permitted in chronological order. Occasionally a detail has been illustrated when the whole object was on too large a scale.