Amazon.com description: Product Description: The calligraphy, illustrations, and decorations that embellish the great books of the Islamic world comprise one of the finest artistic traditions of humankind. Elegance, expressive intimacy, and technical brilliance are basic characteristics of the works. For these reasons they appealed deeply to Henri Vever, well known to the artistic world of Paris in the early twentieth century as a jeweler, collector, and painter. Vever amassed some five hundred Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indian manuscripts, paintings, albums, bookbindings, and examples of calligraphy as well as small groups of lithographs, printed books, textiles, nineteenth-century Burmese and Indonesian works, and Armenian paintings. This material now comprises the Vever Collection in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Vever was so perceptive and thorough a collector and connoisseur that the unexpected, intact reappearance of the collection he amassed is not only a breakthrough in the study of Persian and Indian art but also greatly expands our understanding of French taste and culture.