Paper

The Mughals are famous for their painted pages. Akbar became ruler of the Mughal Empire in 1556 aged just 13 years old. When he inherited his throne he had also inherited a book workshop and as his empire expanded to cover most of the Indian subcontinent, stretching into Afghanistan in the north, many artists from different places came to work for him. In the 1590s the Emperor Akbar ordered a book to be written telling the story of his life. It is called the Akbarnama. A surviving, unbound copy includes over a hundred intricately detailed and vibrant pages depicting hunting, battles, assasination attempts and celebrations.

Artists around the world have created art by sticking paper to things but Georges Braque has gone down in history as the inventor of the collage. Inspiration came from a surprising source - some fake wood-grain wallpaper he spotted in a shop. Georges stuck the paper on to a sketch he had drawn of a fruit dish and glass and in doing so created a boundary breaking artwork which brought the real world into an image. Georges was the co-founder of Cubism with his friend Pablo Picasso and this was a key moment in their experiments in Cubism. A simple wallpaper had changed art history! Picasso was shocked but went on to create many collages of his own. His experiments with paper didn’t stop there - he made sculptures too!

Artists haven’t just used paper to paint or draw on. Mary Delany created scientifically accurate depictions of flowers using a unique method she called ‘mosaik’. She cut hundreds of tiny pieces of coloured paper and stuck them on to a black background, layering different hues to create realistic light and shadow. When it came to making these exquisite works Mary was a late bloomer. She started when she was 72! But she more than made up for it with the 985 works she crafted.

Words by Helena Hunt