Among the works acquired by the French military officer Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726–99) during his tenure in India was a group of architectural studies known today as the Palais Indiens (1774). Painted on hand-fabricated graph paper, these large-format plans and elevations depict monuments from Delhi, Agra, and Faizabad, and are some of the first European-commissioned representations of Indian architecture. This essay argues that in the Palais Indiens, architecture functions as a category of historical inquiry and is used to forge connections between the Mughal past and the changing sociopolitical landscape of eighteenth-century India. It also demonstrates that the creators of the collection developed a new, heterogeneous visual language for the description of architecture, drawing on French and Indian representational conventions. The essay concludes by situating the Palais Indiens and Gentil in relation to later traditions of architectural representation in India, as well as to later collecting trends in Awadh.