Large Indian Qur'an with Vincent van Gogh provenance

[Qur'an]. The Holy Quran from the library of Vincent van Gogh.

€ 28,000.00

From the library of Vincent van Gogh, with his bookplate by Marius Bauer mounted inside the front cover, this complete Qur'an is preserved in an illuminated Indian red morocco binding richly gilt with an all-over floral scroll and a fore-edge flap, a presentation typical of high-quality South Asian Qurans.

The manuscript integrates occasional Persian marginal notes recording counts and reading markers, including verse tallies and pauses, aligned with the Arabic text. An early trade note in 1939 tentatively proposed a Maldives connection on stylistic grounds; however, the burnished Indian paper, the red and black ruling, the mixture of naskh with kufic-style headings, and above all the elaborate gilt binding are consistent with Indian production. The textual tradition follows Hafs an-Asim with the Kufan verse count, and the manuscript concludes with the South Asian dua khatm al-Quran, the devotional close characteristic of the Indian recitational milieu.

Traced from its South Asian context into Amsterdam, where it entered the European market from Van Gogh’s library in 1918 and later passed through Maggs Bros in 1939 and 1940, the volume offers a concrete link between Indian craftsmanship, Persian scholarly notation, and European collecting, uniting script, binding, and provenance into a coherent object history.