ABSTRACT
In 1935, the American heiress, art collector, and philanthropist Doris Duke (1912-93) embarked on a world tour that took her to a number of countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Among the many countries she visited on this tour was India, where she spent over two months traveling to Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (now Kolkata), Delhi, Agra, Baroda (now Vadodara), and Jaipur. The visit left a deep impression on the twenty-two-year-old Duke. As her then-husband James H.R. Cromwell wrote in a letter to his mother, “While we were in Agra Pete [Doris Duke] had fallen in love with the Taj Mahal and all the beautiful marble tile, with their lovely floral designs with some precious stones.”1 Indeed, Duke’s visit to the seventeenth-century mausoleum in Agra, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666), led her to commission a new bedroom suite for an estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where she and her husband were planning to live upon their return to the United States. The suite was finally installed in 1938, in a new residence in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Duke’s residence in Hawai‘i would eventually become a museum of Islamic art, one of the few museums in the United States dedicated specifically for the “study and understanding of Middle Eastern Art and Culture.”2
