At the British Museum 
Peter Campbell
Looking into cases at the small, utterly engaging exhibition of Indian paintings at the British Museum (Faith, Narrative and Desire, until 11 November) I kept bumping my head against the glass. Little greasy smudges showed where others had done the same thing. A label that describes how these works were first used helps explain why we wanted to get close to them. They were not intended to be hung on walls, but to be passed from hand to hand, ‘often enjoyed intimately, at particular times of the day and among a small group of people’ who would ‘share in the particular moods evoked by the paintings’.
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Peter Campbell is the London Review’s resident designer and art critic.
Other articles by this contributor:
At Victoria Miro · Sarah Sze’s Art of Arrangement
At the V&A · Peter Campbell celebrates Penguin’s 70th birthday
At Tate Modern · good plain painting and men in shirt-sleeves
At Tate Britain · Howard Hodgkin
At the Hayward · Alexander Rodchenko
At the British Library · Peter Campbell orders a book at the new British Library
At the Science Museum · The Rolls-Royce Merlin and other engines
At the Royal Academy · Turner’s watercolours
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