thumb|left|Dancing girl in Ajanta fresco; a 2012 photograph (left) and Robert Gill's 19th-century copyDetail from this painting in the V&A Another attempt was made in 1872 when the Bombay Presidency commissioned John Griffiths to work with his students to make copies of Ajanta paintings, again for shipping to England. They worked on this for thirteen years and some 300 canvases were produced, many of which were displayed at the Imperial Institute on Exhibition Road in London, one of the forerunners of the Victoria and Albert Museum. But in 1885 another fire destroyed over a hundred of the paintings in storage in a wing of the museum. The V&A still has 166 paintings surviving from both sets, though none have been on permanent display since 1955. The largest are some . A conservation project was undertaken on about half of them in 2006, also involving the University of Northumbria.Conserving the copies of the Ajanta cave paintings at the V&A , Victoria & Albert Museum, Conservation Journal, Spring 2006 Issue 52, accessed 24 October 2012 Griffith and his students had painted many of the paintings with "cheap varnish" in order to make them easier to see, which has added to the deterioration of the originals, as has, according to Spink and others, recent cleaning by the ASI.
thumb|left|Dancing girl in Ajanta fresco; a 2012 photograph (left) and Robert Gill's 19th-century copyDetail from this painting in the V&A Another attempt was made in 1872 when the Bombay Presidency commissioned John Griffiths to work with his students to make copies of Ajanta paintings, again for shipping to England. They worked on this for thirteen years and some 300 canvases were produced, many of which were displayed at the Imperial Institute on Exhibition Road in London, one of the forerunners of the Victoria and Albert Museum. But in 1885 another fire destroyed over a hundred of the paintings in storage in a wing of the museum. The V&A still has 166 paintings surviving from both sets, though none have been on permanent display since 1955. The largest are some . A conservation project was undertaken on about half of them in 2006, also involving the University of NorthumbriaConserving the copies of the Ajanta cave paintings at the V&A , Victoria & Albert Museum, Conservation Journal, Spring 2006 Issue 52, accessed 24 October 2012 Griffith and his students had painted many of the paintings with "cheap varnish" in order to ma.ke them easier to see, which has added to the deterioration of the originals, as has, according to Spink and others, recent cleaning by the ASI.