Flora and Fauna of India

Tibetan Manuscripts, Vintage Luggage Stickers and Quilts

MacLean Collection

Part of a wooden cover for a Prajnaparamita sutra from Tibet, from the 12th or 13th century.

TIBETAN TREASURES,

A vintage luggage label from Italy, in the book “World Tour.”

A pheasant from India in an early-1800s watercolor.

FAR FROM A MONASTERY

Tibetan religious manuscripts, handwritten on bark paper and illustrated with deities, were pressed between gilded wooden boards carved with foliage, creatures and more deities. For a thousand years teams of monastery artisans collaborated on these books.

They painted proud inscriptions on the wood covers, along the lines of “the golden varnish is bright and soft, radiating like sun rays” and “the proper and dignified forms are pleasing to the learned.”

Untold numbers of the manuscripts were destroyed by foreign invaders and broken up and sold piecemeal by dealers. Western buyers appropriated the covers as wall decorations.

About 100 of these intricately carved wooden panels have been preserved and belong to the Chicago collectors Barry and Mary Ann MacLean. The art historian Kathryn H. Selig Brown spent three years studying them for a new book, “Protecting Wisdom: Tibetan Book Covers From the MacLean Collection” (Prestel).

Letter markings here and there indicate that the long-vanished manuscripts had been part of multivolume series. A few panels have knife scars; past owners had used them as carving boards.

But on Tibetan monastery shelves over the centuries, Ms. Selig Brown said in a phone interview, “They must have been gorgeous, glittering in the light.”

The book covers have a distinct odor, a vestige of the fumes from temple lamps fueled by yak butter. In the book Ms. Selig Brown describes “the potent scent that wafts through the room when the MacLean covers are all together, the aroma intensifying when the covers are handled.”

No Western scholars know how many manuscripts and covers survive in Tibetan libraries because the Chinese restrict access. “At this stage in research there are still many uncertainties,” Ms. Selig Brown writes.

A traveling show of the MacLean covers is in development.

During the current Asia Week New York sales, Tibetan book covers and a few manuscript pages are for sale at Bonhams, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and the Carlo Cristi gallery in Manhattan, each with four- and five-figure prices and estimates.

SIGHTSEEING VIA STICKERS

 Luggage slathered with hotel stickers used to signify a well-traveled owner or a determined poseur.

By the early 1900s so many people were plastering bags with ads for places they had never actually visited that Gaston-Louis Vuitton, a scion of the handbag and luggage manufacturer, was busy ferreting out the exaggerators. “If you got into conversation with one of them, you’d soon find out that the would-be globe-trotter had never needed a passport,” he recalled in a memoir around 1930.

His holdings of 3,000 stickers survive at the company archives. Francisca Mattéoli, a Chilean-born writer living in Paris, pored through them to research “World Tour: Vintage Hotel Labels From the Collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton” (Abrams).

They advertised accommodations from Cincinnati to Belfast and Kuala Lumpur. The imagery is typically the hotel itself, nearby attractions and scenery, and bellhops carrying bags covered with little ads.

The Vuitton collection even documents the evolution of particular hotels’ designs. The Hotel Scribe, on the Right Bank in Paris, commissioned fussy cartouches for its 1910s stickers and then switched in the 1930s to stripes suggesting trains in motion. Its competitor Claridge’s, along the Champs-Élysées, kept using sketches of the facade but minimized the amount of visible architectural ornament over the years.

Ms. Mattéoli has her own family’s albums of souvenir stickers from world tours. She leafs through them for solace and distraction when sad moods settle over her, she said in a phone interview. “It’s a refuge, in a way,” she said. At book signings, she added, “There’s always someone who has a great story to tell and shows me labels I haven’t seen before.”

In 2011 the University of Hong Kong’s museum and art gallery organized an exhibition, “Early Hong Kong Travel (1880-1939): The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited, Benjamin W. Yim and Louis Vuitton Collections” (with a sumptuous catalog from Columbia University Press). Vuitton trunks were displayed alongside labels, including a European-designed 1910s ad for the Peak Hotel with a border of Chinese characters that actually spell gibberish.

 FLORA AND FAUNA OF INDIA

Europeans in India laid claim to natural wonders by paying local artists for watercolors of flora and fauna. Two dozen of their paintings, depicting an assortment of purple-shouldered pigeons, shorebirds and jasmine and geranium stalks, are for sale through March 23 at the Arader Galleries’ Asia Week shows in Manhattan.

The dealer Walter Arader acquired works (priced between a few hundred dollars and six figures each) that belonged to 18th-century adventurers. The British naturalist Mary Impey bore nine children and ran a menagerie in Bengal. William Roxburgh, a Scottish surgeon turned botanist, nurtured 100,000 plants at a time on Madras plantations. The French officer Claude Martin collected mistresses, eunuchs and bird paintings.

Through April 14 the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford in England has an exhibition of bird paintings from Impey’s collection. In a naturalistic style that later influenced the ornithologist John James Audubon, she had her white cockatoo depicted pecking at a custard apple branch, and a pied hornbill clutching a tree stump entwined in a flowering creeper vine.

One of the most famous images from her circle of artists belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a portrait of a fruit bat extending one scalloped wing, which cost around $260,000 at Christie’s in London in 2008.

 

OLD QUILTS, NEW STORIES

Generations of aesthetes have taken different approaches to quilt appreciation. The textiles, during the last century, have been perceived as testimonies to domestic resourcefulness and maternal love; products of slaves and oppressed wives; and precursors of abstract art.

A show opens on Friday at the Brooklyn Museum, “ ‘Workt by Hand’: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts,” with textiles ranging from a 1790s linen street scene to 1880s silk-and-velvet grids to the artist Anna Williams’s 1995 swath of cotton pinwheels. The catalog (published by the museum) and wall texts explain how the fabrics were displayed during various eras.

In the 1860s crowds gathered to watch women perform nostalgic re-enactments of colonial quilting bees. In the 1970s tastemakers including Gloria Vanderbilt happily cut apart old quilts to cover floors and walls with patchwork.

The Brooklyn exhibition is part of a current wave of reinterpretation of quilters’ lives and practices. In late August a show opens at the Bennington Museum in Vermont about the impoverished farmer Jane Stickle’s 1863 quilt, made of 5,602 pieces. Scholars have recently found evidence that Mrs. Stickle exhibited her work. In fact, it won top honors at the Bennington County fair.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, 2013, on page C26 of the New York edition.