The Museum's Edwin Binney 3rd Collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of South Asian paintings outside of India. It consists of more than 1,450 well-chosen images that survey every major school of South Asian painting from Buddhist palm-leaf manuscripts of the 12th century through 19th-century images from colonial India, some made for the European market. The collection has remarkable holdings of miniatures made for the Mughal, Deccani, Rajasthani, and Pahari courts from the 15th to the 19th century. Portraits, court scenes, records of processions and hunts, illustrations of epics and legends, poetry, sacred texts, meditations on love, philosophical treatises, imperial edicts: the Binney Collection has them all.

Most South Asian court paintings were intended for illustrated manuscripts or loose-leaf sets of images that are now dispersed. The Museum's collection includes leaves from almost every known important manuscript or set. All the important schools of Indian painting are represented in the collection, and there are signed or firmly attributed works from a number of important individual artists. The scope and quality of the collection stand as testimony to the deep knowledge and passion that Edwin Binney 3rd brought to his collecting.

• About the collection
• Edwin Binney 3rd
• Where these paintings were made

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