Taj Mahal (タージ・マハル)

The Taj Mahal is a marble mausoleum in Agra, on the south bank of the Yamuna River in Uttar Pradesh in north-central India, constructed between 1632 and 1653 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as the tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth in 1631. The complex includes the central marble mausoleum on a raised platform, four flanking minarets each approximately 40 meters tall and inclined slightly outward so that they would fall away from the central building in an earthquake, a great gateway (darwaza-i-rauza), a mosque in red sandstone west of the mausoleum and a symmetrical answering jamaat hall (or mihman khana) to the east, and the formal char-bagh garden of paths and water channels extending south from the platform in the classical Persian-Islamic quadripartite garden tradition. The mausoleum itself is constructed of white Makrana marble inlaid with semiprecious stones in floral and calligraphic designs (the inlay technique known as pietra dura or parchin kari), with twenty-eight different varieties of precious and semiprecious stones used in the inlays, and is considered one of the architectural masterpieces of the Islamic world and one of the finest expressions of Mughal architecture in its mature seventeenth-century form. The principal architect of the project is generally identified as Ustad Ahmad Lahauri. The complex was largely complete by 1653, with subsequent additions, restorations, and modifications across the Mughal and British colonial periods including the modifications to the gardens under Lord Curzon in the early twentieth century. The Taj Mahal was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983. For Japanese printmaking the Taj Mahal appears as one of the South Asian subjects of Yoshida Hiroshi's 1931-1932 India series. Yoshida visited Agra during his 1930-1931 South Asian travel, which also took him to Benares, Sanchi, Ajanta, Darjeeling, and other Indian sites, and from those observations he produced several compositions of the mausoleum, including views of the building from across the Yamuna River, views through the great gateway, views of the mausoleum from within the char-bagh garden, and dawn, daylight, and evening atmospheric treatments. The Taj prints are issued through Yoshida's own studio in Tokyo in the years following the trip and constitute, with the Benares, Sanchi, and Ajanta sheets, the principal Indian works in his international landscape series. The Taj Mahal series exemplifies Yoshida's distinctive shin-hanga practice of variant impressions, in which the same design is printed under varied light and color combinations to produce dawn, morning, midday, evening, and moonlight versions of a single composition, generally from the same key blocks with different color block applications, allowing the viewer to apprehend the building's relationship to changing light without changing the underlying composition. The visual character of the Taj Mahal in Yoshida's prints is built on the symmetrical white marble silhouette of the mausoleum and the four minarets against the sky, with the central dome flanked by the four smaller chhatri kiosks at the corners of the main platform, the reflection in the still water of the char-bagh canals or the Yamuna River, the diffused atmospheric light, and frequently the small figures of visitors or attendants providing scale and human reference. The site is today managed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the Archaeological Survey of India, and Agra serves as the principal access point for visitors, reached by train from Delhi in approximately three hours along the Agra Cantonment line.

Hanga catalogues 4 prints depicting Taj Mahal (タージ・マハル), by 1 artist.

Hiroshi Yoshida is among the 1 artist who depicted Taj Mahal in our collection.