Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a composite society, both Indian and European, extraordinarily diverse and sophisticated, flourished in the northern Indian city of Lucknow; A Royal Court in India: Lucknow is the first major international exhibition devoted to the cosmopolitan culture that flourished at the Lucknow court and the refined art its multi-ethnic residents and artists gave rise to. This photography book echoes the exhibition Art and Culture in Lucknow, drawn from the LACMA museum in Los Angeles and shown at the Musée Guimet in Paris, featuring a vast nineteenth-century iconography; the same imagery inspired Antonio Martinelli's own parallel exhibition, Lucknow: In the Mirror of Time, a photographic survey of the present-day city through a contemporary black-and-white collection.