Agra
— — the white marble that turns gold at sunrise.
Not only on a wall.
“Agra sits on the south bank of the Yamuna, roughly 230 kilometres downstream of Delhi. The Mughal capital under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, it holds three UNESCO sites within a thirty-kilometre radius: the Taj Mahal, the red sandstone Agra Fort, and the abandoned ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri. The white marble of the Taj reads differently at dawn than at dusk.
Agra, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Agra lies on the south bank of the Yamuna in the state of Uttar Pradesh, about 230 kilometres south of Delhi, with a population near 1.6 million. The city served as the seat of the Mughal Empire under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan from the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. Three UNESCO World Heritage sites lie within a short drive: the Taj Mahal, completed in 1653; the Agra Fort, finished by Akbar in 1573; and Fatehpur Sikri, built between 1571 and 1585 and abandoned within two decades.
The Taj Mahal is built of white marble quarried at Makrana in Rajasthan, inlaid with semi-precious stones — jasper, jade, lapis lazuli, carnelian — set into the surface using pietra dura. Shah Jahan commissioned the mausoleum in 1632 for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who had died in childbirth the previous year; construction continued until 1653 under the architect Ustad Ahmad Lahauri. The marble takes light differently through the day, reading pink at dawn, white at noon, and gold to amber as the sun drops behind the Yamuna.
The Taj Mahal opens at sunrise and closes at sunset, except on Fridays when it is closed for congregational prayer at the on-site mosque. Tickets for foreign visitors include access to the inner mausoleum and currently run about 1,300 rupees. The cool dry months from November through February are the most comfortable; the monsoon arrives in July. Agra Cantonment railway station connects to Delhi in under two hours by Gatimaan Express, and the Yamuna Expressway makes the drive about three and a half hours.