FRANCESCA GALLOWAY Indian Miniatures and Courtly Objects

Francesca Galloway 31 Dover Street, London, W1S 4ND t: + 44 (0) 207 499 6844t: + (1) 917 744 4167www.francescagalloway.com

Indian Miniatures & Courtly Objects Exhibition held at Leslie Feely Fine Art 33 E 68th StreetNew York

16 - 24 March 2012

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Sultan ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur (r. 1656-72)Deccan, Bijapur, c. 1670Opaque watercolour and gold laid down in an album page with delicate leaf and floral designs in gold and coloursAlbum page: 31.5 x 20.5cm; painting: 13 x 10.5 cm

Sultan ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah of Bijapur is viewed behind the balcony of a jharokha portrait, his right hand resting on the carpet that covers the parapet, his left land holding the stem of a hookah pipe. Elements of this portrait are drawn from several sumptuous contemporary miniatures, of which the jharokha portrait in the Barber Institute, Birmingham (Zebrowksi 1983, fig, 108; Crill and Jariwala 2010, no. 33) is the prime source, to which ours is in mirror reverse. With his right hand in that portrait he is smelling a rose, whereas in another portrait sitting on the bed in the collection of the late Moti Chandra, Mumbai (ibid., fig. 107) he is holding the straight long stem of a hookah as here, a stem which is much thinner than the traditional hookah snake seen in Mughal paintings. Another portrait in the British Library again shows him holding this long thin hookah pipe (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 411).

Albums of portraits of Mughal and Deccani princes and notables in oval format form a conspicuous part of Golconda and Hyderabad painting production in the last decades of the seventeenth century done mostly for European consumption (notably albums in the British Museum and Rijksprentenkabinet). ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah of course figures in them

but in both albums in a conspicuously different iconography and obviously in a rather crude Golconda style (Scheurleer 1996, fig. 41; the BM example is similar). Our portrait on the contrary is rendered in a delicate style almost certainly Bijapuri and still apparently in its original delicately tinted album page. One notes the delicacy with which of the facial modelling is achieved as well as the brilliance of the jewels of the striped turban on his head.

ProvenaceGeorge P. Bickford Collection

LiteratureCrill, R., and Jariwala, K., ed., The Indian Portrait 1560- 1860, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2010Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Scheurleer, Pauline Lunsingh, ‘Het Witsenalbum: Zeventiende - eeuwse Indiase portretten op bestelling’ in Bulletin van het RijksMuseum, vol. 44, 1996, pp. 167-254Zebrowski, M., Deccani Painting, Sothebys, London. 1983

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A Family SceneJammu, ascribed to Nainsukh, c. 1755Inscription on reverse reads in English ‘Sri Raja Balwant Dev…’Opaque watercolour, gold and silver on paper 21 x 29 cm

Balwant Singh of Jasrota is depicted in a striped, diaphanous white kurta and purple and white striped paijamas, with an elegant, tall, gold floral brocaded hat edged in silver and fur or wool. He is seated on the edge of a canopied bed, smoking his hookah while his two small sons are nearby.

The rather sparcely decorated setting of this intimate family scene would suggest that Nainsukh was quick to capture moments that gave special delight to his prince. Here, both sons, more diminutive even than the hookah, keep their father company as he takes centre stage, elegantly dressed in informal wear on his white bed with voluminous white canopy, the curtains thrown onto the top of the canopy.

We see the Kulah-like cap in another portrait of Balwant Singh in the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay (Goswamy, 1997 no 65) and a variation worn by one of his sons in ‘Balwant Singh Seated with his Son Facing Him’ in the Indian Museum, Calcutta (Goswamy, 1997, no. 61). There are also other paintings of the ruler with his children (Goswamy 1997, nos 60, 61) and the children on their own (Goswamy 1998, no. 62). Another variation of the canopied bed with the curtains partly hanging down is ‘Raja Balwant Singh Writing in Camp’ in the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay (Goswamy, 1997, no. 79).

LiteratureArcher, W.G. Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1973Goswamy, B.N. Nainsukh of Guler. A Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State, Artibus Asiae, Zurich,1997

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Three Paintings from the Fraser Albums (cats. 3, 6 ,7)Delhi, 1815-17

The Fraser Albums of Delhi Company paintings (mostly dispersed in two sales in London and New York in 1980 and now in collections all over the world) are considered one of the finest groups of Company pictures yet known. These paintings surpass all other known Company paintings for their delicate realism, characterization and subtle composition of groups of figures. These naturalistic studies of local people were commissioned by William Fraser (1784-1835) and his brother James Baillie Fraser (1783-1856) in 1815-1819. William was in the regular civil service of the East India Company, and he spent most of his career as Assistant to the Resident at Delhi from 1805, doing the work of Collector of the District. James came out to Calcutta to be an independent merchant in 1814. He visited his brother in Delhi in 1815, and went with him on an expedition into the Himalayan foothills and Nepal to try to raise irregular batallions of mountaineers at the time of the Anglo-Nepal war. James became a competent draftsman and his views of the Himalayas and later of Calcutta were eventually published back in England, two of the finest sets of aquatints published in the 19th century. He certainly came into contact with Delhi artists during his stay with William and commissioned his brother to have figures drawn for him which he could then incorporate into his Himalayan views. This soon expanded into a much larger project of obtaining drawings of groups and individuals from Delhi and its neighbourhood as records of local life.

Many of the finest portrait studies in these Fraser albums were done from life when young men first came into camp to be enlisted in what became the Second Regiment of Skinner’s Horse, founded in 1814 by the Frasers’ great friend James Skinner. Other portraits in the albums were taken when the Frasers were engaged with Afghan horse traders, a lucrative business interest for William, or else on visits to local noblemen such as the Raja of Patiala. Some of the finest studies are of dancing girls who stare out at the viewer boldly and provocatively. All these portraits with their loose, expressive brushwork are remarkable for the freedom of their poses, the naturalness of their groupings and their engagement with the viewer. As the late S C Welch remarked: ‘Encouraged to show every textile, weapon and twist of hair with illusionistic accuracy, the artist proves that the Mughal tradition remained brilliantly alive well into the nineteenth century’ (Welch et al. 1987, p. 29).

We do not unfortunately know who the principal artists working for the Frasers may have been. The letters and diaries of the brothers refer only to their artists and never give their names, except only three paintings in a different style which they write are by the Patna artists Lallji and his son Hulas Lal (Archer and Falk 1989, pp. 37-38). While speculation

Cat. 3, detail

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LiteratureArcher, M., Company Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1972Archer, M., Between Battles: the Album of Col. James Skinner, Al-Falak and Scorpion, London, 1982Archer, M., and Falk, T., India Revealed: the Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35, Cassell, London, 1989Crill, R., and Jariwala, K., ed., The Indian Portrait 1560-1860, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2010Goswamy, B.N., and Smith, Caron, Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting, San Diego Museum of Art, 2005Losty, J.P., Delhi: Red Fort to Raisina, edited by J.P. Losty Lustre Press Roli Books, New Delhi. 2012Dalrymple, W., Sharma, Y., Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857, Asia Society, New York, 2012Welch, S.C. & Schimmel A., Swietochowski, M.L. & Thackstone, W.M., The Emperor's Album Images of Mughal India, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1987

has centred around the name of Ghulam ‘Ali Khan as being the major artist, this was before the discovery of his signed drawing of 1817 of the Diwan-i Khas in the Delhi palace which shows him to have begun his career as a topographical artist with a very indifferent command of figural drawing (Losty 2012, fig. 87). His earliest signed portraits, of Akbar II and his son Mirza Salim of 1827 (Dalrymple and Sharma 2012, repro. p. 45), admittedly on ivory, bear no resemblance to the work of the major Fraser artists. It is only with his paintings of Skinner’s durbar and farm at Hansi in 1827 that he begins to exhibit the elegant stylisations and elongations that characterise his other work for Skinner and later patrons (ibid. nos. 58-60). An intriguing unsigned painting in Ghulam ‘Ali Khan’s style showing the meeting of Appa Saheb, the deposed Raja of Nagpur, and Raja Isvari Sen of Mandi (reg. 1788-1826) appeared at Christie’s London (6/12/2011, lot 441). This painting appears to be datable to only 1826, since it shows Isvari Sen’s son Ratan Singh (born 1813) as a boy of at least thirteen. Its smooth, hard style of portraiture relates to Ghulam ‘Ali Khan’s work for James Skinner in the late 1820s rather than to the atmospheric, expressive style of the Fraser pages.

Cat.6, detail

Cat.7, detail

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Kunwar Ajit Singh of Patiala and his CourtiersDelhi, 1817, from the Fraser AlbumInscribed on cover paper in William Fraser’s hand with the names of those depicted: Goolab Sing; Khoda Bux; Kupoor Sing; Khuzan Sing; Boodh Sing; Coonur [Kunwar] Ajeet Sing son of Raja Sahib of Patteealah; Ram Juss; Gopal Sing Dewan; Khooshal Sing; Ram Juss.This has been amplified by further lengthy inscriptions by E S Fraser detailing where each man came from and his caste, tran-scribing William Fraser’s notes, for details of which see Archer and Falk 1989, p. 40. Watercolour and bodycolour on paper22.6 x 30.8 cm

The young prince of Patiala Ajit Singh sits in the middle of his group of advisers. From E S Fraser’s inscriptions we learn that his Diwan or minister Gopal Singh sits in the middle of the trio on his right, while the chowrie bearer behind the prince is his favourite, Budh Singh Jat Dondidar. This type of informal court scene is more typical of Rajput courts than of the still hierarchical arrangements at the Mughal court which our Delhi artists would be more accustomed to painting.

In 1817 William was deputed by the Resident at Delhi to attend to a territorial dispute between the British and the Maharaja of Patiala, the largest of the Phulkian Sikh states east of the River Sutlej, which had accepted British protection in 1809 largely to escape being taken into Ranjit Singh’s empire. Ajit Singh’s father, Maharaja Sahib Singh, had died in 1813, and his successor and elder son, Maharaja Karam Singh, was reigning under the regency of his mother, Aus Kaur Sahiba. Ajit Singh was the second son by a different wife, Nand Kaur Sahiba. Born in 1803, he was still only fourteen when he met William Fraser, and still a little young to be engaged in serious negotiations. Other group portraits were produced on this occasion of the courtiers and ministers of Patiala (Archer and Falk1989, pls. 16, 17, 102-04), of which one includes two brothers of the regent Maharani, who doubtless were the chief negotiators over the border dispute.

William Fraser had obviously taken one of his best artists along with him, to produce what is one of the finest paintings in the entire series. Again we have no doubt that these are all faithful portraits, from the large-eyed, solemn young prince, conscious of his responsibilities in these negotiations, to the ministers and attendants who surround him. As a durbar painting, balance is essential, so the colour is concentrated in the centre, on the seated prince. The looser grouping of four figures on the left is balanced by the extra colour applied to the tighter grouping of five figures on the right.

PublishedFalk and Archer, 1989, pl. 17

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Portrait of Fath ‘Ali Shah Wearing the Kayanid CrownDelhi, c. 1820Inscribed on reverse of the frame in Persian in William Fraser’s hand:Shabih-e fath 'alikhan qajar padshah-e jamjah-e iran (‘Portrait of Fath 'Ali Khan Qajar, the Jamshid-like monarch of Iran’)Opaque watercolour and gold on paper Oval :12. 5 x 9.8 cm in a contemporary wooden and brass frame

Fath ‘Ali Shah of Iran (reg.1798-1834) is portrayed kneeling on a carpet against a plain wall with a wooden balustrade with geometric inlay design, on which stands an elegant two-handled vase of flowers. The king is richly dressed in a puce coat with elaborate pearl and emerald ‘cloud-collar’ and wide, jewelled arm bands and other bejewelled accoutrements – the belt, the dagger stuck in it and the long curved sword hanging from it. He holds a long string of pearls in his left hand while in his right rests the mouthpiece of his hookah.

All portraits of Fath ‘Ali Shah were state portraits, incorporating both Oriental and European elements, and sort to convey to a wider world the magnificence and luxury of the Persian court. Reproduced many times as gifts to rulers and foreign ambassadors, such pictures, both large oil paintings and smaller watercolours (Sims 2002, fig.91 & cat.194 & Falk 1973, nos 15 & 16) were sent all over the world for public relations purposes.

Our portrait, executed in Delhi between 1815-1820, for William Fraser, is painted on identical paper to a contemporary portrait of the Mughal Emperor Akbar II,

also commissioned by Fraser (see cat.5). Both portraits are similarly framed and bear his inscriptions on the back of the frame. This presupposes the existence of a Qajar portrait of Fath ‘Ali Shah in Delhi at this time. Another kneeling image of the Shah in a miniature painted by Mirza Baba in Tehran in 1802 is the frontispiece of Fath ‘Ali Shah’s own Diwan which he sent as a gift to his ‘brother’ George III of England. Similar but not identical to our portrait, this Diwan is now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle (Holmes MS a-4/RCIN 1005020; Sims 2002, fig.91, p.84).

ProvenanceWilliam Fraser and by descent

LiteratureSims, E., Peerless Images – Persian Painting and its Sources, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002Diba, L. ed, Royal Persian Paintings – The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925, I.B. Tauris, London, 1998Falk, S.J., Un Catalogue de Peintures Qajar executes au 18 e au 19 siecle, Teheran, 1973

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The Mughal Emperor Akbar IIDelhi, c. 1820Inscribed on a label on the reverse of the frame by William Fraser: Akbar Saunee King of Dehlee – a capital likeness and in Persian: shabih-i Muhammad Akbar Shah Badshah vala-jah-i Hindustan (‘Portrait of Muhammad Akbar Shah the Exalted [Ruler] of Hindustan’)Opaque watercolour and gold on paperOval: 12.5 x 9.8, in a contemporary wooden and brass frame

Akbar II (reg. 1806-37) is seated half-length on a chair and holding a hookah snake. He wears a magnificent robe striped in gold and silver with a similar cummerbund, a white turban held in place by a gospech and an emerald sarpech or turban ornament surmounted by feathers and pearls. The gospech is more normally associated with Lucknow court dress, but Akbar seems to have been especially fond of wearing it as it appears in most of his portraits.

William Fraser as Assistant to the Resident at the court of Delhi (successively David Ochterlony, Archibald Seton, Charles Metcalfe and Ochterlony again in the period that interest us here from 1805-1820) would have been constantly in and out of the Red Fort to pay his respects to the Emperor. Quite apart from official duties to take him there, any British visitor would also need escorting. As soon as he and his brother James arrived back from their Himalayan tour in August 1815, for instance, they went to court to pay their respects (Archer and Falk 1989, p. 37). So William’s testimony that this is a capital likeness of Akbar II is valuable.

The Emperor was born in 1760 and so was forty-six on ascending the throne. This portrait must be some years later and so a little later than his four known portraits by Ghulam Murtaza Khan. The earliest seems to be that in the Chester Beatty Library Dublin (Leach 1995, no. 8.55) dated to the fourth regnal year (1809/10) which shows him in profile and wearing a similar turban, with just two attendants. His beard is still half dark with grey only at the chin. Dated to the same year is a formal durbar portrait now in the Khalili collection London (Leach 1998, no. 44) again showing him in profile and with the same turban. Undated but with his beard now mostly white is a portrait with four of his sons in the India Office collections in the British Library (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 227i; Losty and Leach, no. 32) which by comparison with the Khalili durbar scene must be about 1811 or 1812 rather than the c. 1810 date given it in those publications. Here Ghulam Murtaza has portrayed him with a chequered furry turban but has turned his face and body round to almost full face, having learnt to create this type of portraiture under European influence. He looks distinctly worried. Another durbar scene in the Cincinnati Museum attributed to Ghulam Murtaza Khan shows him in this same

pose and also worried and is securely dated to 1811-15 (Smart and Walker 1985, no. 19).

Portraits of about 1820 in a style more Delhi ‘Company’ than Late Mughal show him with a completely white beard although he still wears a turban with a gospech (Losty 2012, fig. 71). Perhaps in continuance of this trend towards greater naturalism, only a delicate nimbus surrounds his head here, rather than the solid green one with an outer rim of gold that he normally sports in his earlier portraits. The same delicate nimbus is found in a portrait of the Emperor signed by Shaikh A’zam of Delhi and dated 1245/1829-30 (private collection).

One notes with pleasure various felicities as prolonged examination reveals them: the thickness of the gospech round Akbar’s turban, the weight and volume of his body, the way his clothes fit over his body with naturalistic folds and creases, the fine muslin of his shirt visible at neck and especially his left wrist where some of his pearl bracelet is seen through it. There are some infelicities of course – is he really holding his hookah snake? And perhaps the artist has foreshortened his right eye a little too much in his anxiety to produce a three-quarter view face. But such things are part of the charm of this hybrid style. If such portraits were done perfectly in a totally naturalistic way, then they would not be Indian at all.

ProvenanceWilliam Fraser and by descent

LiteratureArcher, M., and Falk, T., India Revealed: the Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35, Cassell, London, 1989Leach, L.Y., Paintings from India: the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. VIII, Nour Foundation, London, 1998Losty, J.P., and L.Y. Leach, Mughal Paintings from the British Library, Indar Pasricha Fine Art, London, 1998Losty, J.P., Delhi: Red Fort to Raisina, edited by J.P. Losty, Lustre Press Roli Books, New Delhi. 2012 Smart, E., and Walker, D., Pride of the Princes: Indian Art of the Mughal Era in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, 1985

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A Group of Recruits to Skinner’s HorseDelhi, 1815-16, from the Fraser AlbumInscribed on a cover sheet in William Fraser’s hand with their names and origins: i Dhun Singh a Brahman of Sonah Mour & District Mewat ii Rukha a Rajpoot Mussulman of Niganah vil[lage] district Beree – Hurreeanah iii Gunga Deen a Brahman of a vil[lage] near Lucknow iv Bhugwant a Goojur of Sonah town & district Mewat v Peer Bux a Mussulman Rajpoot of vil[lage] Kan Lour district Rohtak, Hurreeanah vi Sada ditto ditto - vii Peera a Mussulman Rajpoot of vil[lage] Kan Lour district Rohtak, Hurreeanah – now all troopersWatercolour and bodycolour on paper23 x 37.8 cm

The seven recruits are grouped in a line across the page standing on a narrow strip of land against an uncoloured background. They are dressed fairly similarly in the undress uniform of Skinner’s Horse regiment: a white angarkha worn over a white tunic, white shalwar and red cummerbund and turban or hat. A trooper similarly dressed appears in another group of recruits with a trooper in the full dress uniform which gave the regiment its nickname of the Yellow Boys (Archer and Falk 1989, pl. 57). A second version of our painting is in the Skinner Album in the India Office collections in the British Library (Archer 1972, p. 200; Archer 1982, no. 4) where the men are inscribed simply Mewatis. Some of the recruits are indeed from Mewat but others are from further afield including a Brahman from Lucknow, another Mewati Brahman, a Gujar from Mewat, and four Muslim Rajputs from Haryana. Mewatis from south of Agra on the border country with Rajasthan were renowned as tough quarrelsome fighters while the men from Haryana west of Delhi were similarly tough villagers, used to defending their fields from the hordes of marauders which had preyed on them as the Mughal empire collapsed around them.

The painting is one of the most brilliantly composed in the entire group. Any suggestion of monotony in the lineup and similarity of costume of the seven men is overcome by this artist in the subtle zigzagging of the line, the interplay of swords and lances in the left half of the picture and the brilliant stroke of the cummerbund slung casually across a shoulder in the right half matching spears going in the opposite direction. The predominant brilliant red of the cummerbunds and headgear in the centre of the painting is varied subtly at the extremities with blue, pink and deep crimson and a highlight of the same deep crimson in the central man’s turban.

This type of line-up of figures had not been seen in Indian painting for two hundred years. Manohar had initiated the group portraits in the Mughal studio with his portraits of Akbar and Jahangir receiving princes and courtiers often in a line but had been constrained by the need to have the Emperor higher or larger than his entourage. It was left to Govardhan and Payag to create more believable groupings in their paintings involving soldiers, musicians and ascetics

where the arrangements of the figures tended to form gentle curves. The Fraser artist’s grouping here, however, represents more than just an innate Mughal sense of composition, since we know from James Fraser’s journal that he began to draw individual studies of Gurkhas and then ‘a picture intended to represent a Ghoorka company’ which he must have shown to his artist to get him to understand what he wanted (Archer and Falk 1989, p. 45). He was not after a masterpiece of composition, rather a believable grouping of men all of them clearly defined with their clothes and accoutrements which he believed at the time he could fit into his Himalayan views.

Even so, the artist here has drawn on his innate sense of form and colour to produce not the boring costume painting that James wanted but brilliant portrait studies. All of them are individually differentiated, real characters, no doubt lost in their thoughts as they sat, bored, to have the first sketches taken of their heads, thinking no doubt of the life they had left behind in their villages and how different and more dangerous their military life might turn out to be.

PublishedFalk and Archer 1989, frontispiece

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Portrait of Amir Bakhsh, SeatedDelhi, c. 1815, from the Fraser AlbumInscribed on a cover sheet by E S Fraser: Ameer Bakhsh a dancing woman of Dehlee in her ordinary dress Watercolour and bodycolour on paper31 x 22.3 cm

James Fraser was intrigued by the dancing women of Delhi when he arrived there on 9 August 1815 and that same evening attended a nautch. He had obviously attended similar events in Calcutta for he was used to the type of entertainment it provided and he was pleased with the singing, unlike most of his countrymen. At another nautch he was impressed by a dancing girl called Malagir and had her portrait painted twice, once it would seem by Lallji, the Patna artist who had taken up temporary residence in Delhi (Archer and Falk1989, pl. 15) and another by one of the Delhi artists, unnamed (ibid., pl. 125). There are also other portraits of named dancing women in the collection - Pyare Jan, Amir Bakhsh, and Kandar Bakhsh (ibid., pls. 125-28). Malagir is depicted in one of her dancing costumes but the others are in ‘off-duty’ or ‘indoor’ costume (khanagi) of loose fitting shalwar and bodice with shawls draped around their upper bodies, as is Amir Bakhsh in this portrait. In some ways these are the most interesting portraits in the albums, since not only are they obviously portraits of real women, extremely rare in Mughal portraiture, they are also depicted individually staring out at us with a frankly appraising gaze. Although many of the other

subjects of portraits in the albums look out at us, their eyes are still inward turning, inhabiting the self-absorbed interior world of Mughal portraiture.

There was a fine line between dancing or nautch girls and courtesans (tawaifs) who occupied an honoured place in the Muslim cultures of India, especially in Lucknow and Delhi. They were trained to be women of great refinement, skilled in music and dancing, and appreciative of courtly literature in Persian and Urdu. Their company was eagerly sought by the great men of Delhi and their visitors, when they would perform a nautch for their entertainment. Pyare Jan, although in her portrait in the Fraser albums is called a dancing woman, yet appears in a group portrait of women who are obviously courtesans (Crill and Jariwala 2010, pl. 56; Goswamy and Smith 2005, no. 117).

Amir Bakhsh is seated in a standard Regency type of arm chair with turned front legs and arm supports, not an item of furniture one would expect in her residence (for which see Crill and Jariwala 2010, no. 56), but James Fraser writes of getting Malagir at least to come to William’s bungalow to have her portrait taken (Archer and Falk 1989, p. 37)

and possibly did so with the others too. She is dressed in her ‘indoor’ costume of a loose fitting, light yellow shalwar embroidered with flowers, a tight transparent bodice and an embroidered shawl, and wears extravagantly large earrings as well as a dangling hair ornament. Her visible slipper has an equally extravagant curl at the toe, but the other she has

taken off and she rests her foot on a small footstool. She looks out at the viewer challenging the world.

PublishedArcher and Falk 1989, pl. 126

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Staggered Ogival Medallions with Leafy FramesOttoman Turkey, second half 16th centurySilk lamps with silver-gilt lamella wrapped around yellow silk core102.5 × 63 cm

Rows of staggered, large ogival medallions with leafy frames float on a plain crimson background. Each cusped medallion encloses a floral arrangement in red, white and green around a central pomegranate motif on a gold ground and is surrounded by a leafy frame in white outlined in red. Elements of the design and restrained colour scheme can be compared to a blue ground silk with leafy white frame in the Bargello Museum, Florence (inv.no.2521C) published in Atasoy 2001, pl.59 and Suriano 1999, cat. 27. The interior floral decoration in the medallion is quite close to another example in the Cleveland Museum of Art, dated to the third quarter of the 16th century (inv.no.46.419) published in Atasoy 2001, fig.214.

Ottoman art experienced its most brilliant era in the 16th century, when the empire reached its apogee and when the growth of its economy was strongest. The silk weaving industry had its roots in Byzantium but the importance

given it by successive Ottoman sultans, starting with Mehmet II in the mid 15th century ensured the production of a strictly regulated industry of superlative quality. Imperial workshops in Bursa and Istanbul produced highly inventive, bold and elegant designs which remain as astonishing and yet modern today as when they were made.

ProvenancePrivate Collection, USA

LiteratureAtasoy, N., Denny, W.B., Mackie, L.W. and Tezcan, H., IPEK – The Crescent & the Rose – Imperial Ottoman Silks and Velvets, Azimuth Editions Limited, London, 2001, pl. 59, figs.214, 218Suriano, C.M., Carboni, S., Islamic Silk – Design and Context, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, 1999

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Portrait of Sultan Mustafa IOttoman, early 18th centuryOpaque watercolour and gold on paperFolio: 23 x 13.5 cm; painting 17 x 8.5 cm

The marginal inscription gives the period of his reign as 3 years and his life as 25 years.

This posthumous portrait of Sultan Mustafa (r.1617 -18 and 1622-23) I was originally part of a prose work on the Ottoman dynasty entitled ‘Qiyafat al-Insaniya fi Shamayil Usmaniya’ by Luqman ibn Sayyid Husayn al’Ashuri al’Husayni which consisted of twenty-two portraits of Ottoman sultans, including a posthumous warrior portrait of Mustafa II by Levni, now in the Louvre

Portraits of Sultan Mustafa I are quite rare. There are a series of sultan portraits in the Topkapi Palace Museum Library (Kebir Musavver Silsilename A3109) which Gul Irepoglu believes could be by Levni, painted during the reigns of Mustafa II (r.1695-1703) and Ahmed III (r.1703-1730). Among these portraits is one of Mustafa I. Another portrait

of this sultan is in the Topkapi Sarayi Muzesi (17/389). It is a 17th century painting on canvas attributed to a Spanish artist. Mustafa I has been described as having a puny body but an attractive face with pale complexion and sorrowful eyes. Like many members of his family, he lived in closed confinement for many years prior to his accession.

ProvenanceSotheby’s New York (21.5.81 lot 126 folio 67a)

LiteratureIrepoglu, Gul , Levni - Painting Peotry Colour, Istambul 1999,14b, p. 73ed Raby, J., The Sultan’s Portrait, Topkapi Palace Museum,Istambul, 2000, no. 68, p. 316

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Yali with tiny elephantsSouth India or Deccan, 16th or 17th centuryIronHeight: 16 cm; length: 16 cm

Yalis are mythological feline beasts with wings, mainly seen in Hindu temples in South India but they were depicted over a long period in different parts of India and in several medium. Here, we illustrate an exceptionally early India silk thought to have been woven in East India in the late 15thcentury or early 16th century, depicting a design of rampant yalis within roundels (please refer to cat. 11 for full description by Rahul Jain).

The silk serves here as background to a solid, heavy and roughly cast iron yali. This 16th or 17th century sculpture from South India or the Deccan, depicts a mythological leonie beast grasping tiny elephants within its claws, tail and even swallows one whole. Mark Zebrowski suggested that our object might have served as a weight in commerce (Zebrowski 1997, p. 104).

ProvenanceSimon Digby Collection

PublishedZebrowski, M., Gold, Silver & Bronze from Mughal India,Alexandria Press,London, 1997, p. 102

LiteratureCarvalho, P.M., Gems and Jewels of Mughal India, London, 2010 Ed Kroger, J., Islamische Kunst in Berliner Sammlungen, Parthas Berlin, 2004Seyller, J., The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002Zebrowski, M., Gold, Silver & Bronze from Mughal India, Alexandria Press,London, 1997

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Winged Felines in RoundelsEast India, 15th-16th centurySilk samite89 x 35 cm

This silk belongs to a rare group of Indian draw-loomed silks discovered in Tibet. Most of them are woven in the complex fabric structures of samite and lampas and date from the 15th to the 17th centuries. As many pre-date the earliest surviving silks of the Mughal period, they are of the utmost importance to the study of medieval Indian textile history. Our silk is one of the earliest of the group.By the time this silk was woven in India, the theme of inhabited roundels had already appeared for a thousand years in draw-loomed silks woven elsewhere in Asia. In this relatively late, attractive Indian version, a winged feline is confined within a plain roundel. The creature is of simple but menacing form, freely suspended within its circular space. Absent here is the decorative infill often seen in this sort of woven design. A simple quatrefoil motif occupies the interstices of the pattern. It is likely that this cloth would have been joined to other lengths and used as a panel or hanging in a Tibetan monastery. Apart from its outstanding decorative value in an architectural setting, an expensive silk samite such as this probably carried a certain ritual significance for its wealthy donor. The accumulation of merit, in particular, was a highly desired outcome of donating precious textiles to Buddhist temples. A silk of this design might also have been stitched into an aristocratic or ecclesiastical garment. Ordered roundels or rows of fantastic animals and

birds appear on garments depicted in 14th to 16th century manuscript painting from west India, and even earlier in the 12th-13th century murals in the Buddhist temples of Alchi in Ladakh, in north India (Guy 1998, fig. 57, p. 52; Goepper 1995, fig. 1, p. 101). The feline beast of this silk, a singha vyala or yali, is a mythical creature endowed with protective powers. It appears as a heraldic motif in Indian temple sculpture of all periods and regions. In this instance, it is of an East Indian type that is unique in the arts of India. Its sinuous, energetic form distinguishes it from the fleshy, ponderous bodies of vyalas from other regions. The snarling canine head, deep-set fangs and nodule nose recall those of a Chinese dragon rather than of the stately leonine representations that appear elsewhere in medieval Indian art. Bronze vyalas from medieval Assam and Bengal are similarly lean, ferocious, houndlike creatures. The Chinese-style winged lion was the royal emblem of the Ahom rulers of Assam, who are believed to have brought it with them when they invaded the area from northern Myanmar in the 13th century (Das Gupta 1982, p. 82). An alternative explanation might lie in the prolific exchange of embassies between Ming China and Sultanate Bengal in the first half of the 15th century. Compared to the vyala, the quatrefoil motif in the interstices is more anonymous. It is one of many floral devices that appear with subtle and endless variation in India’s temple sculpture

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and painting from the earliest times. Its representation in this silk has been compared to motifs seen in early sculpture from east India (Cohen 1997, p. 101). It may be compared, equally successfully, to minor decorative devices in medieval painting from the region (Losty 1980, fig. 8, p. 13). More specifically, the roundels of this silk reproduce the ‘lion coins’ of the Sultanate rulers of Bengal. Small, slender felines with plumed heads, arranged in the same posture as in this silk, appear in a series of coins issued by Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud Shah (1437-1459) from about 1445 onward (Choudhury and Ray 1974, pp. 84-86; pl. IV, nos. 6-9, page unnumbered). A very similar series was issued from about circa 1490 onward from another neighbouring kingdom, the hill state of Tripura (Banerji 1913-14, p. 250; pl. LXVIII, nos. 4-13, page unnumbered). This trend followed the precedent set by Sultan Jalal al-Din Muhammad Shah (1415-1433), a Hindu convert, when he issued in 1421 one of the largest and heaviest silver coins ever minted in India (see illustration p. 2) (Farid 1976, p. 88; pl. V, page unnumbered). The dramatic vyala depicted on the reverse of that coin is not only the first such creature to appear in the Islamic coinage of east India but also resembles closely a more elaborately drawn vyala in another Indian samite from this group of medieval silks (that textile, one of the earliest Indian silks known so far, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. no. 1993.21-m; Cohen 1995, Fig. 13, pp. 34-35). It is reasonably certain that this particular example was woven in east India sometime during the 15th or early 16th century. The west Assam-north Bengal region was an ancient, culturally rich area known for its silk industry and was held intermittently, in this period, by the Hindu rulers of Kamrupa-Kamata and Koch Bihar as well as the Muslim sultans of Bengal. By then, the influence of Bengal’s sultanate art had spread all the way to the eastern frontiers of Assam, and it is possible that a silk such as this one was originally woven for the Bengal court but entered the brisk export trade to neighbouring Tibet.

Text by Rahul Jain

ProvenancePrivate collection, USA

LiteratureBanerji, R.D., ‘Notes on Indian Numismatics’, Annual Report, Archaeological Survey of India, 1913-14, 1913-14, nos. 1-3, pp. 248-261Barnes, R., Cohen, S., and Crill, R., Trade, Temple and Court: Indian Textiles in the Tapi Collection, India Book House Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2002Choudhury, V., and Ray, P., ‘Hitherto Unknown Lion-Type Coins of Nasiruddin Mahmud Shah I of Bengal,’ Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, XXXVI, 1974, pp. 83-87Cohen, S., ‘A Group of Early Silks, The Tree Motif ’, J. Dhamija, ed., The Woven Silks of India, Marg Publications, Bombay, 1995, pp. 17-36Cohen, S., ‘A Samite Hoard,’ HALI, 91, 1997, pp. 100-101 Das Gupta, R., Art of Medieval Assam, Cosmo Publications, New Delhi, 1992Das Gupta, R., ‘Textiles of Medieval Assam,’ L. Chandra and J. Jain, eds., Dimension of Indian Art, Agam Kala Prakashan,Delhi, 1986, pp. 149-159Farid, G. S., ‘A New and Unique Ten Tankah Commemorative Coin of Jalaluddin Mohammad Shah of Bengal (818-837 A.H.),’ Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, xxxviii, 1976, pp. 88-95Goepper, R., ‘Dressing the Temple, Textile Representations in the Frescoes at Alchi,’ Asian Art, HALI Annual, 1995, pp. 99-118Guy, J., Woven Cargoes, Indian Textiles in the East, Thames and Hudson, London, 1998Losty, J.P., Krishna, A Hindu Vision of God, The British Library, London, 1980 Lyon, Musee Historique des Tissus, Lyons Historical Textiles Museum and Graphic-sha Publishing Co. Ltd., Lyons and Tokyo, 1980Riboud, K., ed., Samit and Lampas, Indian Motifs, A.E.D.T.A., Paris, 1998

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An Important Enamelled Pandan Mughal, Akbar period, possibly from Multan in the Punjab, c.1570-1600Gilt copper and champlevé enamelDiameter:14.5cm, height: 6 cm

This eight-petalled and lobed box and cover is one of, if not the earliest example of Indian copper enamelling to have survived (Zebrowski 1997, nos 75, 76, 77). It is a beautiful and quite extraordinary early Mughal object, displaying the imaginative skill of its artist. Part of its beauty lies in its use of enamel where sometimes the design is created by the copper with the enamelling as background and sometimes, the reverse. On each lobe, with cusped arch and Cyprus tree borders, clusters of plants sprout from a bed of rocks on a mauvish-blue ground, their delicacy and style reminiscent of 16th century Safavid painting (Kroger 2004, pp.102-103). Similar treatment of plants can also be seen in some of the Hamzanama paintings (Seyller 2002, pp.146-148; 228-229). The top is decorated with a circle enclosing delicate floral decoration on a white ground, surrounded by a simple leaf and flower decoration on black ground. There are remains of blue and white enamel along the rim of the cover while the underside of the base is decorated with white and mauvish-blue enamel in a lively trellis design of single flowers and leaves around a large floral central motif against the plain copper background. The inside of the lid, the most protected part of the object, is spectacular with raised, painted and enamel decoration of Cyprus trees radiating around a central medallion against the copper ground, although faint traces of

the original mauvish-blue background remain. The enamelled decoration is pale blue, yellow and black on a brilliant turquoise ground. Certain elements of the decoration, notably the base of the pandan, relate to a 17th century tray from the Punjab, possibly Multan, in the Khalili Collection (JLY 1895) (Carvalho 2010, no. 6, pp. 34-35; p.19). Robert Skelton has linked this group with Multan tile production from the same period.

ProvenanceSimon Digby Collection

PublishedZebrowski, M., Gold, Silver & Bronze from Mughal India,Alexandria Press,London, 1997, p.88

LiteratureCarvalho, P.M., Gems and Jewels of Mughal India, London, 2010 Ed Kroger, J., Islamische Kunst in Berliner Sammlungen, Par-thas Berlin, 2004Seyller, J., The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002Zebrowski, M., Gold, Silver & Bronze from Mughal India,Alexandria Press,London, 1997

Underside of base

Inside of the lid, overleaf

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Muzaffar KhanMughal, c. 1595, based on an earlier portrait by ‘Abd al-Samad, from the Polier AlbumInscribed below with an eighteenth century attribution to Miskin. On the reverse a page of Nasta’liq calligraphy mounted in an album page with border of sprays of small orange flowers.Opaque watercolour and gold. laid down in an album page commissioned by Col. Antoine Polier of large stylised sprays of flowers over a cream groundAlbum page: 39 x 27.7 cm; painting: 13.5 x 8.9 cm

A black-bearded middle-aged man is depicted kneeling on a rug with two long boxes before him, presumably document cases or pen-boxes. He wears a cream jama and a white slightly chequered cummerbund and a small white Akbari-type of pagri or turban. A knife-case is slung from his cummerbund. Behind him the background is coloured green and dotted with clumps of flowers, two of them somewhat incongruously emerging from the rug as if it were the balustrade of a terrace. Other portraits identify this striking figure as Muzaffar Khan (Seyller and Seitz 2010, no. 2). Muzaffar Khan Turbati was in 1573 made Governor of Malwa and in 1578 Governor of Bengal, but had to face unsuccessfully a rebellion of the Afghan nobility in the east. He was killed in 1580. Another portrait of him comes from the Salim Album and is now mounted up in a later album in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (RCIN10050038, f. 7).

Seyller gives a reference to an unpublished portrait in the Gulshan Album in Tehran reliably ascribed to the early Mughal master ‘Abd al-Samad: ‘In that drawing a figure with a furrowed brow is shown seated on a carpet with both hands resting on his legs and an inkwell and two long boxes before him. His neck is longer and his beard fuller, the latter almost complete engulfing his lips.’ It seems clear that our portrait is based ultimately on the ‘Abd al-Samad drawing rather than the version in the Seitz collection where there is no base or background at all and the figure’s right hand is raised up. Our portrait conforms in format to other early Mughal portraits such as the young scholar by Mir Sayyid ‘Ali formerly in the Binney collection and now in the Los Angeles County Museum (Brand and Lowry 1995, no. 6) where too the figure kneels on a carpet viewed in plan. Another well-known portrait of an enormously plump Chagatai woman depicted in the same format and conventionally dated c. 1595 may also similarly be based on an earlier Mughal drawing (ibid., no. 51). Similar flowers are depicted behind her albeit with a strip of ground to make them appear less incongruous than in our portrait. We can assign the same date to our retrospective portrait of Muzaffar Khan. In the words of Abu’l Fazl: "His Majesty himself sat for his likeness, and also ordered to have the likenesses taken of all the grandees of the realm. An immense album was thus formed; those that have passed away have received a new life, and those who are still alive have immortality promised them".

The painting comes from one of the albums put together by the Swiss patron Col. Antoine Louis Henri de Polier (1741-95). He arrived in India in 1757 working initially for the French East India Company but transferred his allegiance to the English Company at the end of the Seven Years War. He was a military engineer and architect and eventually worked in those capacities for the Nawab Vizier of Avadh Shuja’ al-Daula and his successor Asaf al-Daula. His collection of albums was sold to the English collector William Beckford, and then passed to his daughter the Duchess of Hamilton. They are now mostly in two museums in Berlin, although various albums at different times were either given by Polier to his friends in India such as Lady Coote, now in the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, or the artist Ozias Humphry, now in the British Museum. Others like this one that ended up in the Phillipps collection, who bought it from the bookseller Howell & Stewart in 1834, seemed to have left the collection before Beckford bought the others.

The portrait has been mounted in an album typical of those commissioned by Polier. Unlike many of his paintings, it remains untouched. It was his habit when in Delhi 1775-80 especially to acquire earlier Mughal drawings which he thought unfinished and have his retained artist Mihr Chand colour them, add a background and then have his other craftsmen mount them in the kind of exuberant album pages which characterise his entire collection (Polier 2001).

ProvenanceCol. Antoine PolierSir Thomas PhillippsThe Robinson Trust

LiteratureBrand, Michael, and Lowry, Glenn D., Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory, Asia Society, New York, 1985Polier, Antoine, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: the I’jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773-79) of Antoine-Louis-Henri Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, trans. and ed. by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, Delhi, 2001Seyller, J., and Seitz, K., Mughal and Deccani Paintings, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 2010Sotheby’s. Bibliotheca Phillippica, London, 27 November 1974, lot 749

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FalconDeccan, Bijapur, 17th centuryOpaque watercolour and gold on paperAlbum page: 20.5 x 17.5 cm; painting: 12.5 x 9.5 cm

Falcon with sharp green beak and well defined talons, golden eye and white feathered chest with brown, white and dark grey striated wings, stands on a multi-coloured perch with raised right talon, against a yellow background.

The finest birds in Mughal painting were those commissioned by Jahangir who was a keen observer of nature and who maintained a rich menagerie and an aviary. His outstanding atelier of painters recorded unusual specimens. These portraits are carefully observed and taken from life. In 1619 Jahangir ordered Mansur to draw the likeness of a falcon brought from Persia. He writes: What can I write of the beauty and colour of this falcon? There were many beautiful black markings on each wing, and back, and sides. As it was something out of common, I ordered Ustad Mansur, who has the title of Nadir ul ‘Asr to paint and preserve its likeness’

(Tuzuk-I Jahangirnama, vol. 2, p.108).A falcon on a perch by Nadir ul ‘Asr Ustad Mansur from

the Goloubew Collection is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Verma 1999, p. 13) Falcons on their perches were also favourite subjects for the aristocratic patrons in the Mughal Empire and the Deccan. Our bird of prey stands out on account of his fierce concentrated expression and raises his talon in anticipation of sport.

LiteratureJahangir, Tuzuk-I Jahangiri or Jahangirnama, tr. A.Rogers, ed.H. Beveridge, London, 1904-14 Verma, S.P., Portraits of Birds and Animals under Jahangir in Flora and Fauna in Mughal Art, Marg Publications, 1999Zebrowski, M., Deccan Painting, Sotheby Publications, 1983

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Royal Pigeons Round a DovecoteMughal, c. 1650-60Inscribed in Persian on the dovecote: amal-I Mansur naqqash (‘the work of the illuminator Mansur’).Opaque watercolour and gold on an album leaf with florally-decorated and gilt-sprinkled borders. On the reverse is a page of ten lines of nasta'liq calligraphy from a Mughal manuscript, with interlinear illumination.Album Page: 46.9 x 31.6 cm, painting: 18.7 x 11.3 cm

Two pigeons, black save for their heads and ends of their wing and tail feathers, are courting before a small gold portable pigeon house (kabutar khana). The male on the right is chasing the female. Surrounding them within a border are fourteen other smaller pigeons of different varieties, mostly in pairs. The inner panel with the main pair of birds is of a more deeply biscuit-tinted paper than the surrounding area. The format is a replica in miniature of that of the portrait pages of the so-called Late Shahjahan Album where the figures painted in the borders reflect something of the character of occupation of the main portrait.

Pigeon flying is thought to have originated with the Mughals’ Timurid ancestors in Central Asia. It became a popular sport at the Mughal court, and was called ishq-baazi (love-play) by Emperor Akbar, who is said to have kept 20,000 royal pigeons. The birds were bred and trained in the palace and became greatly valued. The pigeons were given names such as Ashki (the weeper), Parizad (the fairy) and Almas (the diamond). It is described in the third volume of the Akbarnama, the official history of Akbar’s reign, the A'in-I Akbari (Abu’l Fazl, pp. 298-303), while a whole manual, the Kabutarnama, is devoted to the subject (British Library

IO Isl4811). Pigeon keeping and flying remained one of the principal imperial pastimes. In the nineteenth century the courtyard of the Diwan-I Khass in the Delhi palace was filled with kabutar khana or pigeon houses (Losty 2012, pp. 66-67) and even in the annual grand ‘Id processions the emperors took a great basket full of pigeons with them (Global India, p. 91).

An identically composed eighteenth-century version of this subject was with Colnaghi in 1976. The present version differs in that it bears the attribution to the Mughal artist Mansur. This attribution cannot, however, be substantiated when compared with securely ascribed paintings (see Das 1991 and Verma 1999 passim). It is also is painted on two types of paper. This second point would indicate that the central portion may be of earlier date and concept than the surround, although the technique and quality of painting in the two zones is identical.

Studies of pigeons form some of the earliest subjects of Mughal independent natural history paintings, often in pairs with a portable pigeon house as here. An exquisite drawing of these three elements linked by floral sprays is in the Fogg Art Museum (Welch and Masteller 2004, no. 24), there attributed

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LiteratureAbu’l Fazl ibn Allami, The A’in-i Akbari of Abu-l-Fazl, trans. by H. Blochmann, Calcutta, 1903-1939Das, A.K., ‘Mansur’ in Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, ed. P. Pal, Bombay, 1991, pp. 39-52Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Global India: Court, Trade and Influence 1300-1900, Francesca Galloway, London, 2009Hurel, R., Miniatures et Peintures Indiennes, Editions BnF, Paris. 2010Losty, J.P., Indian Book Painting, British Library, London, 1986Losty, J.P., Delhi 360°: Mazhar Ali Khan’s View from the Lahore Gate, Lustre Press Roli Books, New Delhi, 2012Verma, S.P., Flora and Fauna in Mughal Art, Marg, Bombay, 1999Welch, S.C., and Masteller, K., From Mind, Heart and Hand: Persian, Turkish and Indian Drawings from the Stuart Cary Welch Collection, Yale University Press and Harvard University Art Museums, New Haven, etc., 2004

to Abu’l Hasan c. 1610. Our right hand pigeon is possibly based on one of that pair, in mirror reverse. A band with a very similar pair of pigeons and a pigeon house was added to the bottom of one of the portraits from Akbar’s first imperial portrait album of c. 1595 in order to fit into a different album format in the seventeenth century (Losty 1986, no. 24). At the same time other pairs of birds (including two pigeons and a dovecot) are found in the Dara Shikoh Album of c. 1633-44 with unlike here some indication of landscape (Falk and Archer 1981, illustrated on pp. 388, 400), as also in a painting of a pair of brown and white pigeons in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Hurel 2010, no. 29) which appears to be from Jahangir’s reign.

ProvenanceColnaghi, 1979Lloyd Collection, London, 1979-2011

Published Colnaghi, P & D & Co., Paintings from Mughal India, London, 1979, no. 22

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A BearMughal, c.1640Brush drawing in ink on paper5.5 x 7 cm

A bear pads softly across the page, its composition swiftly but most sensitively executed, particularly with regard to the bear’s head and its expression. The drawing has some similarities to Govardhan’s 1630-40 painting of a bear being led by a dervish in the Kevorkian Album in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (Welch et al.1987, no.77).

John Seyller has suggested our bear may be a preliminary study for this painting (email 5.10.2011). There are differences to the two animals in particular the more rounded back of the Kevorkian bear which gives the animal a more energetic gait.

Several drawings by Imperial Mughal artists of the late 16th and early 17th century include sketches of animals executed in a manner similar to our bear (Welch & Masteller 2004, cat.19 & detail p.X, cats.21 & 25).

ProvenanceColnaghiRothschild collection

LiteratureWelch, S.C., Schimmel, A. Swietochowski, M.L. & Thackston, W.M., The Emperor’s Album: Images of Mughal India, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1987Welch, S.C. and Masteller, K., From Mind, Heart and Hand: Persian, Turkish and Indian Drawings from the Stuart Cary Welch Collection, Yale University Press and Harvard University Art Museums, New Haven, 2004

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The Horse-SacrificeBy Mughal artist for a non-royal patron, c. 1605Inscribed on reverse of album page in Hindi: asvameda yagya raja Yudhisthira ki poso bhav (‘the fulfilment of King Yudhisthira’s horse-sacrifice’) Opaque watercolour and gold on paper,mountedon an album pageAlbum page: 35 x 20.5; painting: 31.5 x 17 cm

In Book XIV of the epic Mahabharata, Yudhisthira has regained his kingdom and in accordance with ancient Indian tradition wishes to assert his authority over all other kings through the asvamedha sacrifice. In this tradition, a sacrificial horse was set free and allowed to wander for a year into other territories. Foreign kings had either to accept Yudhisthira’s authority, the horse being backed up with his army, or fight. Eventually the horse returned to the capital and was sacrificed. Within the royal palace, Yudhisthira and his four brothers are seated wearing the appropriate clothing with their queen positioned by the slaughtered animal, while a Brahmin duly tends the fire and prepares to make the offerings. The Sanskrit text prescribes the making of a four-storeyed cayana or sacrificial altar, which the Persian text and the artist here have interpreted as a large octagonal building. Below that our artist has filled in the space with a palace entrance scene against a yellow ground covered with floral sprays.

The folio is from a manuscript of the Indian epic the Mahabharata in the Persian translation made for the Emperor Akbar (1556-1605). The first imperial version made for Akbar between 1582 and 1589, with 169 miniatures, is in the Jaipur royal collections, but several other versions are known from shortly afterwards created for less exalted Mughal patrons. The first of these bears a date of 1598 and 124 of its miniatures were dispersed in 1921, apart from the last 5 books with 24 miniatures which are now in the British Library (Or. MS 12076, Losty no. 88). This is usually assigned to the category of sub-imperial patronage, made for patrons other than the Emperor, but Seyller has argued that it is a product of the imperial workshop (Seyller 1999, pp. 24-27). The second Razmnama bears a date of 1605 and is mostly in the Birla Academy in Calcutta (A215-217, Khandalavala, pp. 165-80). A third widely dispersed manuscript bears the date 1616-17 and was produced in the studio of ‘Abd al-Rahim Khankhanan (Seyller, pp. 252-57). Whereas the first two of these sub-imperial manuscripts follow the latest trend in imperial painting and have little or no text interrupting the composition of the painting, the last and latest of them always has its paintings wrapped round large text panels. ‘Abd al-Rahim had notably Persianate tastes in manuscript painting and preferred a style of manuscript illustration where text and

painting remained in balance on the page.There is a close stylistic connection between our folio

and the manuscript in the Birla Academy dated 1605. This is a complete manuscript with 81 miniatures and appears to be intact in three volumes and is also somewhat larger than our page. The same subject as ours also appears in the Birla manuscript on f. 568r. Despite the (spurious) attributions on the painted folios to many of the most illustrious Akbari period artists, it is clear that this is not a product of the imperial studio. It is linked stylistically and through its scribe and marginal rulings (the manuscript has clearly not been remargined as stated by Khandalavala) to the same studio in Ahmadabad that produced the Anvar-i Suhayli and Zafarnama of 1600-01 for a patron possibly to be identified with Mirza ‘Aziz Koka, the then Subahdar or Governor of Gujarat (Losty 1982, nos. 84-85). Obviously many artists must have produced the 81 miniatures of the Birla manuscript, but of those published in Khandalavala there is a close correlation between the yellow ground strewn with clumps of long-stemmed flowers in the lower part of our miniature and Bhima preparing to hurl a dead elephant (Khandalavala, 6.4, p. 175). Likewise the way that the five Pandava brothers are depicted and crowned in that manuscript is echoed in our painting. For general discussions about Popular and Sub-Imperial Mughal styles, see Losty, pp. 102-03 and 121-24; Khandalavala and Khan, pp. 16-25; and Seyller, pp. 29-38.

LiteratureLosty, J.P., The Art of the Book in India, British Library, London, 1982Khandalavala, K., and Khan, R. A.,Gulshan-e-Musawwari: Seven Illustrated Manuscripts from the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, 1986Khandalavala, K., ‘A Sub-Imperial Akbari Period Razm Nama of 1605’ in A Collector’s Dream, ed. K. Khandalavala and S. Doshi, Marg Publications, Bombay, 1987, pp. 165-80Seyller, J., Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: the Freer Ramayana and other Illustrated Manuscripts of ‘Abd al-Rahim, Artibus Asiae, Zurich, 1999Galloway, F., Asian Textiles, Indian Miniatures & Works of Art, Francesca Galloway, London, 2000

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Lady Holding a Wine CupMughal, c.1650–60Opaque watercolour on paper heightened with gold, in a buffalbum page with large gold flowersFolio: 25.5 x 18 cm; painting: 13.6 x 8.7 cm

The lady stands full-length holding a wine glass in her right hand and holding out her other hand as if to support the delicate object. She is dressed in orangey-pink paijama or shalwar covered overall with a transparent peshwaz and a deeper pink orhni with pearl and gold borders which is wound round her shoulders and over the back of her head. A gold decorated patka falls from her waist to her feet. Her feet are thrust into open-backed striped slippers. Jewelled earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings and anklets complete the ensemble. She stands silhouetted against a black ground which has been let into an oval mount, salmon pink decorated with large gold flowers.

The object in her hand is held by its stem, suggesting it is a kind of glass or goblet, although it appears to be made of jade with gold mounts rather than glass. A lady in the Dara Shikoh Album of 1633–42 is holding a similar object with rather less care, letting it dangle loosely from her hand (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 68, fig.14, also Schimmel 2005, fig. 54). Ladies holding such objects normally have a bottle as well, blessedly absent in this case. Our lady’s face and body are delicately modelled. The extreme length of her patka, to which Seyller calls attention as an unusual feature leading him among other reasons to date the painting to Avadh c. 1750 (Seyller and Seitz, no. 23), is in fact found in other 17th century female portraits. A page in the Late Shah Jahan Album now in Dublin, for instance (Leach 1995, col. pl. 70) has border decorations of standing and seated ladies displaying this very feature. Here its extreme length is perhaps exaggerated by some restoration work that has shortened the peshwaj (it originally fell to her instep as witnessed by the gold border still left there). There is no evidence that the patka itself has been lengthened. While it is normally thought that portraits or studies of individual

women by themselves were not done until the 1630s, nonetheless there are indications that some such studies are earlier (Beach1978, fig. 49). A beautiful group of four female studies dating from the Jahangir period is in the Johnson Collection in the British Library (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 42, not illustrated), put together and mounted in a single Deccani style album page in the late seventeenth century, while the portrait in Rampur ascribed to Abu’l Hasan of Nur

Jahan standing in male costume with a rifle is now generally thought to be contemporary (Losty 1991, fig. 8; Schimmel 2005, fig. 55). Otherwise single portraits of women by themselves occur in Mughal albums from the 1630s onwards, beginning with the many such representations in the Dara Shikoh album of 1633– 42 (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 68) while a few others occur also in the Late Shah Jahan album mostly assigned to c. 1650 (e.g. Dye, no. 89b, Leach 1995, pp. 446, 465). A particularly beautiful example is in the Johnson Collection in the British Library (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 99; Losty 1986, no. 35 and cover) ascribed to the otherwise unknown artist Raghunandan c.1660. Her facial features are very similar to our example. To what extent such female representations are in fact portraits is an open question: the many problems are summarised in Leach (Leach 1986, pp. 134–36).

ProvenanceEva and Konrad Seitz

LiteratureBeach, M.C., The Grand Mogul Imperial Painting in India 1600-1660, Williamstown, 1978Dye, J.M., III, The Art of India, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Philip Wilson, London, 2001Schimmel, Anne-Marie, The Empire of the Great Mughals, History, Art and Culture, trans. Corinne Attwood, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2005Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Leach, L.Y., Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings: the Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Oriental Art, Part One, The Cleveland Museum of Art., Cleveland, 1986Leach, L.Y., Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995Losty, J.P., Indian Book Painting, British Library, London, 1986Losty, J.P., ‘Abu’l Hasan’, in: Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, ed. P. Pal, Bombay, 1991, pp. 69-86Seyller, J., and Seitz, K., Mughal and Deccani Paintings: Eva and Konrad Seitz Collection of Indian Miniatures, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 2010

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seems no record of a son Umar al-Din. For other relevant contemporary Bikaner paintings see Khandalavala et al. 1960, pl. E, and Bautze 1991, nos. 25-26. For discussion of the lineage of seventeenth-century Bikaner artists see Krishna 1995 and 2000.

LiteratureBautze, J., Lotosmond and Lowenritt: Indische Miniaturmalerei, Linden Museum, Stuttgart, 1991Khandalavala, K., Chandra, M., and Chandra, P., Miniature Painting: a Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Sri Motichand Khajanchi Collection, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1960Kossak, S., Indian Court Painting 16th – 19th century, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1997Krishna, N., ‘Paintings and Painters in Bikaner: Notes on an Inventory Register of the 17th Century,’ in Indian Painting: Essays in Honour of Karl J. Khandalavala, ed. B.N. Goswamy with U. Bhatia, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1995Krishna, N., ‘The Umarani Usta Master-Painters of Bikaner and their Genealogy’ in Court Painting in Rajasthan, ed. A. Topsfield, Marg, Bombay, 2000, pp. 57-64

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Lady Holding Handkerchief and BottleBikaner, 1650-75Opaque watercolour on cotton25.5 x 18.5 cm

Reportedly once inscribed on added backing sheets in Persian: ‘work of Umar al-Din, son of Shah Muhammad’ and in Hindi Dipak Raga.

In this damaged but still lovely large fragment of a cloth painting a girl stands poised with handkerchief and bottle under an archway. She is of course a subsidiary figure which means that the main figures would be under a larger arch to the right and with possibly another smaller arch balancing the one on the left so that the complete painting would have been quite large for a miniature. The imperial Mughal influenced phase of the style of Bikaner under Raja Karan Singh (r. 1632-69) can be somewhat dry as for example in the c. 1640 Ragamala series (e.g. Kossak 1997, no. 18). Our girl is a good example of the loosening up of the style after Ruknuddin’s influence had spread within the studio with more pronounced tonal modelling and Deccani-influenced colouring and colour effects. She closely resembles the subsidiary figures in a painting by Ruknuddin of a zenana scene with two ladies embracing on a terrace c. 1665 (ibid., no. 32).

According to Krishna (2000), the mid-seventeenth century artist Shah Muhammad had a brother Umar Shah but there

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Central Section of a Royal FloorspreadSouth-East India, probably Petaboli, for the Golconda court, c. 1630 - 40Cotton cloth, painted resist and mordant dyed1.07 x 4.64 m

The unifying vocabulary of ornament which permeates all the Islamic arts produces a harmonious whole. So, for example, the art of illumination, architectural surface ornament or carpet decoration was also used to embellish textiles. When their technical and artistic quality is masterful, such as in this example, the art becomes world-class.

This central section of a royal painted cotton floorspread consists of the entire width, showing both borders and the central lobed medallion with part of the field, decorated with wildly exotic flowers of an inventiveness and exuberance that one associates with the best of Deccani art. Our large textile relates most closely to a complete summer carpet and a fragment both now in the Cincinnati Art Museum (Smart 1985, p. 65) in addition to part of a floorspread now in the TAPI collection (Barnes 2002, no. 61). These textiles belong to a small group of important Golconda court painted cottons, a velvet and pile carpets which came into the possession of the Kachhawaha clan of Rajputs, sometime before 1645. Their palace was at Amber near present day Jaipur.

Many of these textiles bear Amber palace inventory notations on the back, some with the ownership seal of Mirza Raja Jai Singh of Amber and dates, the earliest being ah 1066/ad 1645–6 (Smart 1987, pp. 7-23). Raja Jai Singh (r.1621–1667), an eminent general campaigning in the Deccan under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, must have brought this material back to Amber, either as war loot or through purchase from the Golconda court.

This group was first identified by John Irwin in his 1959 article ‘Golconda Painted Cottons of the 17th Century’. His research into early 17th century English and Dutch trade records, his identification of local dyes and his stylistic analysis of the designs identified Petaboli on the Coromandel Coast as the probable centre for production. Textiles such as these, using the most highly skilled craftsmen and raw materials available only in limited supply, were clearly destined for the luxury market

and production could never have been large. By 1636 European traders could no longer procure them because ‘the Great Magore (Mughal emperor) and Persian (Shah of Iran) took so great affection unto fine paintings; but after that they delighted therein, the said places adjacent Masuliptama were wholly taken up for their use, with command from the King of Golconda (whose country it is) that the painters should work only for them […]’ (Irwin 1959, pp.14, 15).

These royal Golconda painted cottons including tent panels (qanat) and small covers (rumals), all dating from the first half of the 17th century, came to the West in the first half of the 20th century, through the great collector dealers, Imre Schwaiger (1868–1940) and Nasli Heeramaneck (1902–1971). Ellen Smart wrote a detailed study of this group based on the inventory inscriptions and dates in her 1986 article for the Textile Museum Journal.

ProvenanceToshkana (storeroom) of royal house of Amber/Jaipur Nasli HeeramaneckPrivate collection, USA

LiteratureBarnes, R., Cohen, S., Crill, R., Trade, Temple and Court – Indian Textiles from the Tapi Collection, India Book House, Mumbai, 2002, nos. 61, 61a, 61b, 61c.Ed. Guy, J., Swallow, D., Arts of India – 1550–1900, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1990, pl.37, 196, pp.116-119.Irwin, J., ‘Golconda Cotton Paintings of the early 17th Century’ in Lalit Kala, no 5, April 1959Smart, E. ‘A Preliminary Report on a Group of Important Mughal Textiles’ in The Textile Museum Journal, Washington D.C., 1986Stronge, S., Made for Mughal Emperors – Royal Treasures from Hindustan, I. B. Tauris, London, 2010, pl .172, pp. 203-211

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Lady Seated at her ToiletteHyderabad, 1720-50Opaque watercolour and gold laid down on an album page decorated with large white flower against a gold groundFolio: 34,2 x 21 cm; painting: 18.0 x 10.2 cm

A lady wearing striped shalwar and a front-opening peshwaz over a bodice is seated on a golden footstool, while one attendant combs her hair and another stands watching with a cup in her hands. The two attendants are dressed similarly in plain white and with gold-edged dupattas over their heads. The scene is set in a green open space with a few tufts of grass marked that ends in a blue sky with white striped clouds.

The three-quarter view of the principal lady’s face and her large dark expressive eyes are found in many paintings with similar escapist themes from Hyderabad in the first half of the eighteenth century (e.g. Zebrowski 1983, figs. 217, 219, 221). A possibly related ragamala series shows the same sort of eyes given to men as well as women (e.g. Seyller and Seitz 2010, no. 46). Hyderabad painting from this period is largely composed of love-sick languishing ladies as its

artists rediscovered the charms of the feminine body after the brief superimposition of Muslim orthodoxy following Aurangzeb’s conquests of 1686-87 (Zebrowski 1983, ch. 12). This particular subject, derived ultimately from earlier Hindu carvings in stone and ivory, was popular later in the century e.g. in a drawing in the Latifi Collection, Mumbai (ibid., fig. 239) and a version set on the terrace of a palace in the Brooklyn Museum (Poster et al. 1994, no. 66).

LiteraturePoster, Amy G., et al., Realms of Heroism: Indian Paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1994Seyller, J., and Seitz, K., Mughal and Deccani Paintings, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 2010Zebrowski, M., Deccani Painting, Sothebys, London. 1983

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Museum Rietberg Zurich (Boner et al 1994, nos 40-44) and a sixth page was in Kapoor Galleries New York ( Masselos Menzes and Pal 1997, no.199). In its flat and schematic manner and its cool palette, fired by accents of red-organe, this series is an early example of the various mid-eighteen century provincial Mughal styles which developed out of the Muhammad Shah style- with the profuse use of gold and silver and some motifs, like the palm trees in our miniature, lending it a Deccani flair. This Ragamala series may have been produced for Nazim al Mulk (r. 1724-48) who was Muhammas Shah’s prime minister, but left the chaotic Delhi court to conquer the viceroyalty of the Deccan in 1724, becoming the first of the Mughal governors who declared themselves autonomous rulers. (extracted from Seyller 2010, cat. 46)

ProvenanceEva and Konrad Seitz

PublishedSeyller, J., Mughal and Deccani Paintings- Eva and Konrad Seitz Collection of Indian Miniatures, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 2010, p. 136

LiteratureMasselos, J., Menzies, J., Pal, P., Dancing the Flute- Museic and Dance in Indian Art, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997Boner, G., Fischer, E., Gosway, B.N., Sammlung Alice Boner, Museum, Rietberg, Zurich, 1994

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Sri Raga: Illustration to a RagamalaBy a Deccani artist, c. 1720-40Opaque watercolour and gold on paperFolio: 28.2 x 18.9 cm; painting: 24 x 14.7 cm

Sri means lord and the Sri Raga is the lord of the ragas, the musical modes. This raga, a tender melancholic spiritual tune, is played in the second half of the afternoon.

Our miniature greatly expands on the Rajasthani painting tradition of Sri Raga where the king is seated on a throne in a pavilion veranda listening to two musicians who sit before him.

Here we have a palace with a lower and upper courtyard and three musicians and seven attendants. The musicians are joined by the celestial Tumburu who wears a violet jama adorned with golden flowers, a gold shawl and turban. The Sri Raga himself is in the upper courtyard, enthroned in the veranda of his three-storey pavilion. He is portrayed like the massively proportioned kings in Deccani portrait miniatures of the seventeenth century.

The Ragamala series to which our miniature and cat 23 belongs is stylistically related to a group of miniatures which were painted during the first quarter of the eighteenth century in the Mughal province of Hyderabad, as the kingdom of Golconda was renamed after the conquest 1687. The best known examples of that group are an illustrated manuscript of circa 1700 of the Gulshan-I Ishq (Rose Garden of Love) and a second illustrated romance, dated 1709 and executed in a simplified style. Sri Raga and Khambavati Ragini (see cat. 23) come from one of the fines series of the early Hyderabad style. It is carefully drawn and meticulosly detailed - note the impasto geometri pattern on the border of the raga’s jama, or the tiny parrots in the palm trees- and is burnished to a porcelain-like hardness.

Five other pages of this series are in possession of the

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Illustration to Ragamala: Khambaravi RaginiBy a Deccani artist, c. 1720-40Inscribed on the reverse in nasta’liq: arana az-dipak (‘Arana from Dipak (raga)’ and in nagari: arana?Opaque watercolour heightened with gold on paperFolio: 28 x 19.5; painting: 23.5 x 15.7 cm

A prince lies languidly on his bed missing his beloved while a musician plays her vina for him and a female attendant massages his feet. He is lying in a canopied bed inside a pavilion with high red walls and an orange dado. His sword lies beside him along with drinks and a pan box while his bow and arrows hang on the wall. A terrace in front has a small pool with a fountain and steps lead down into a small garden. Candles are lit on the terrace. Above are the silver moon and stars. The painting is set in orange red album page sprinkled with clumps of gold flowers, the whole evincing an extraordinarily vivid colour scheme. It clearly comes from a Hindu environment on account of the leftwards tying of the prince’s jama and the Vaisnava tilak mark on his forehead.

The prince’s posture conforms to a standard Deccani format of a lady waiting for her lover, sometimes with the attention of a duenna (Falk and Archer no. 422, Zebrowski figs. 223 and 226). A similar painting is in the Kankroli collection (Ebeling, pp. 106 and 199), but there the prince is fully bearded and his jama is tied on the right side, indicating he is meant to be a Muslim. That painting is part of a ragamala set and is inscribed Khambavati ragini. A similar painting in the Archaeological Museum, Hyderabad, is labelled Bhairavi

ragini, while another (Maggs Bros Bulletin, no. 8) is inscribed as Bhairava raga. This painting is yet another version of this ragamala iconography.

ProvenanceDoris Wiener, New York, 1973Robert and Bernice Dickes Collection, New York

ExhibitedArt for Collectors, Cleveland Museum of Art, Fall 1971, no. p.1374

LiteratureEbeling, K., Ragamala Painting, Ravi Kumar, Basel, 1973Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Zebrowski, M., Deccani Painting, Sothebys, London. 1983Masselos, J., Menzies, J., Pal, P., Dancing the Flute- Museic and Dance in Indian Art, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997Boner, G., Fischer, E., Gosway, B.N., Sammalung Alice Boner, Museum, Reitberg, Zurich, 1994

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A Prince Seated with Ladies in a LandscapeBy a Mughal artist of the early 18th century with additions in Avadh, c.1770Inscribed in a cartouche above: tasvir-i husn ‘alam sharab ‘The portrait of Husn-e ‘Alam (‘Beauty of the World’) [drinking ?] wine’ On the reverse is the Persian seal of Sir Elijah Impey ‘Sir Elihah Impey,.... Magnificence ...’ Opaque watercolour and gold on paperFolio: 47 x 32.5 cm; painting: 27.3 x17.2 cm

A prince sits with a group of women on a carpet in a meadow. He takes a small goblet of wine from one woman, at whom he is looking, while holding the hand of another who is offering him a fruit. Two other women hold flowers or wine while a third has a small hand drum. On the carpet between them is a mat spread with dishes containing fruit and sweetmeats and a flask of wine.

The figures enjoying their picnic seem to be by a Mughal artist of the early 18th century, although the soft handling of the modelling of the females is reminiscent of an earlier style. The somewhat harder handling of the prince, the curious perspective of the drum and the haphazard scattering of the items on the mat confirm rather an 18th century date. As happened to many earlier paintings when they reached Avadh, their original probably plainer backgrounds were thought unsatisfactory and were repainted (see Losty 2002). Here in the first instance the originally quite small painting had a new landscape background added. The handling of the trees here is similar to that in a painting in Dublin attributed by Leach to Mihr Chand, c. 1770 (Leach 1995, p. 659, col. repro. p. 665) while the distant landscape and tiny trees also are found in his work. However, in order to fit into the large album page it was further extended on all sides. The trees and sky in the extension fit in well with the original landscape extension and are perhaps by the same artist, but the opportunity ought to have been taken to paint a balustrade between figures and landscape to give the painting some spatial cohesion. It is possible that the trees and foliage on either side extended lower down the painting but were subsequently somewhat crudely over-painted.

The album page of buff, gold-splashed paper with a inscribed cartouche above indicates that this page came from a collection of paintings similarly mounted, both contemporary and from the previous century, that Leach mistakenly suggests (1995, pp. 654-56) was assembled for the Nawab of Avadh Shuja’ al-Daula in Faizabad, c. 1770. Some of the pages seem to have been acquired as an album by Sir Elijah Impey and have been dispersed. Some of Impey’s pages were acquired by Francis Douce and are now in the Bodleian Library (Douce Or. A.3, nos. 15-28), others went to France in the late 19th century, some entering the Pozzi collection (Pozzi catalogue, nos. 17-21, 24, 71, 82; see Losty 2008, no. 11). Others from this large album remained in India and were acquired by an Admiral Fremantle and are now in the Chester Beatty Library. While some of the inscriptions in the cartouches are straightforward, others are less so. Our painting and a group formerly in the Pozzi collections have similar inscriptions that

led the Pozzi cataloguer to propound that they came from an album of narrative paintings with a hero called Hosn (actually meaning ‘excellence’).

ProvenanceCharles Gillot collection, France

LiteratureSuccession de M. Jean Pozzi: miniatures mogholes, indiennes, tur-ques et arméniennes, manuscrits, Rheims & Laurin, Paris, 1970Leach, L.Y., Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995Losty, J.P., ‘Towards a New Naturalism: Portraiture in Mur-shidabad and Avadh 1750-80’, in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. B. Schmitz, Bombay, 2002.Losty, J.P., Paintings from the Royal Courts of India, Francesca Galloway, London, 2008

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Dara Shikoh with Holy Men from the Ardeshir AlbumMughal, c. 1680-1700On the reverse nasta’liq calligraphy Opaque watercolour and gold mounted in an album page decorated with floral trellis designs in goldAlbum Page: 55.5 x 34 cm; painting: 22.8 x 18.5 cm

The scene is set in a courtyard surrounded by simple houses under the shade of a large neem tree. A brilliantly coloured sky suggests it is evening. A prince whose appearance conforms to that of Dara Shikoh is visiting an old mulla with a long white beard sitting on a tiger skin, while two other holy men sit by. Dara Shikoh is often depicted in the company of mullas and ascetics, beginning when he was about fifteen years old with a group of unidentified sages about 1630 (Beach 1978, no. 63). A still young-looking and beardless Dara Shikoh is depicted about 1640-45 with Mulla Shah (d. 1661), whose disciple he became in 1640, in a Persian manuscript which reached the royal library in Paris in 1667 (Bibliothèque Nationale 1986, no. 32). He is depicted with Mulla Shah and the latter’s teacher Mian Mir (d. 1635) in paintings in Tehran (Godard 1937, t. 2, fasc. II, p. 202, fig. 72), in the former Vever Collection now in the Sackler Gallery Washington D.C. (Lowry and Beach 1988, no. 377), and also in the Johnson Collection in the British Library (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 92, unillustrated, c. 1650-60) and he also became associated with another saint Lal Sahib Faqir (ibid., no. 158). Few of the ubiquitous ascetics and mullas abounding in mid-seventeenth century pictures have been identified with certainty. The aged mulla with the long white beard might be the same unknown mulla as in pages from the Late Shahjahan Album in Dublin attributed to Govardhan (Leach 1995, no. 3.59) and in San Diego by Payag (Goswamy and Smith 2005, no. 62). Although

in these paintings he wears the long gown and the meditation band, he is not sitting on a tiger skin as here. Another unknown ascetic associated with a tiger skin mat worn over his shoulder and a tiger skin hat but considerably younger than our man is in a page from the same album also in Dublin (Leach 1995, no. 3.56). The gown patched with many colours worn by the holy man front left resembles that worn by Lal Sahib Faqir when visited by Dara Shikoh (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 158) but the holy man is not the same.

ProvenanceArdeshir AlbumSotheby’s London, 26 March 1973, lot 29

LiteratureBeach, M.C., The Grand Mogol, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 1978Bibliothèque Nationale, A la cour du Grand Mogol, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1986Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Godard, Y., ‘Un album de portraits des princes timourides de l’Inde’ in Athar-é Iran, Paris, 1937Lowry, Glenn D., and Beach, M.C., An Annotated and Illustrated Checklist of the Vever Collection, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1988

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A Prince Visiting a Female AsceticDeccan, early 18th century Opaque watercolour and gold on paperFolio: 34.7 x 24.6 cm; painting: 25.5 x 17.8 cm

A prince is visiting a female ascetic but sits at his ease beside her as if he were in his own palace. He is richly dressed in a green flowered jama and similar turban and smokes from a hookah. She sits demurely beside him dressed in a plain lilac gown and a patchwork cloak. Her matted hair hangs down in long tresses all smeared in ashes and her knees are caught up in a yogapatta or meditation band. She is clearly a Saiva devotee as she wears a Saiva sectarian mark on her forehead. The pair is sitting in an enclosed terrace outside her hut and under an awning. On the terrace outside the enclosure three richly dressed Hindu ladies and a child bring offerings of fruit in a gold bowl and a morchhal, while on the left another lady richly dressed in a gown over her shalwar and her hair caught up by a bandeau (an intimation that she is on the yogini path) leans on the swing that is attached to the fig tree that shades the hermitage.

Both hut and awning are richly decorated with gold brocades and pearls, so clearly she is a ascetic lady of consequence with rich devotees of whom the prince must be one. He has a nimbus and with his chin beard is perhaps meant to represent Prince Bidar Bakht, grandson of Aurangzeb, who spent some years as Subahdar of the Deccan. For a Mughal portrait of Bidar Bakht, see Sharma 1974, pl. 4, cat. no. 8. The ‘heroes’ of Deccani painting at this time often seem based on Bidar Bakht’s portrait as in a related painting from the Deccan c. 1700 of a prince on a terrace with ladies in the V & A (Zebrowski 1983, fig. 184) and also the large painting of a prince at a well in the Jehangir collection, Bombay (ibid., fig. 216). Other riches abound in our picture.

The hookah and its base are of crystal and two gilt and enamelled crystal tazze sit beside it as well as glass vases of flowers.

The richness on display all around contrasts strongly with the obvious poverty of the woman. Unlike earlier, richly dressed Deccani yoginis (for which see Zebrowski passim) she is a genuine ascetic. Her face seems derived from Deccani versions of Christian themes such as the Virgin Mary or the Magdalen (see Falk and Archer 1981, nos. 442, 443, 444i). Her iconography of a three-quarter view of her face with her long hair smeared with ash went on to have a decisive influence on the Deccani-influenced paintings of Mir Kalan Khan and his school in Avadh – for instance Falk and Archer 1981, no. 245i, Leach 1998, no. 49 and McInerney 2011, fig. 15.

LiteratureFalk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Leach, L.Y., Paintings from India: the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. VIII, Nour Foundation, London, 1998McInerney, T., ‘Mir Kalan Khan’, in Beach, M.C., Fischer, E., and Goswamy, B.N., Masters of Indian Painting, Artibus Asiae, Zurich, 2011, pp. 607-22Sharma, O.P., Indian Miniature Painting: Exhibition Compiled from the Collection of the National Museum, New Delhi, Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, 1974Zebrowski, M., Deccani Painting, Sotheby, London, 1983

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Panel of Embroidered Furnishing Fabric, possibly for Bed HangingsGujarat, early 18th century, for the English marketTwill woven cotton embroidered in silk chain stitch265.5 x 85 cmDesign repeat: 70 cm

A pair of panels finely embroidered in brilliant coloured silk in chain stitch on a twill cotton ground, with a repeating vertical meandering design of sinuous tendrils with different varieties of flowers and leaves. The flowers in variations of pink, red, blue, aubergine and white form a balanced contrast to the leaves in dark green outlined in yellow. A similar Gujarati export embroidery (c.1720-40) is in the Rijsmuseum (inv.no. BK-1980-773-B; Campen & Hartkamp-Jonxis 2011, fig. 35).They (the people of Cambay) embroider the best of any people in India, and perhaps in the world. Their fine quilts were formerly carried to Europe. I have seen some worth £40....’ from Alexander Hamilton’s travel book first published in 1725 (Hamilton 1930, vol.I, p .86).During the sixteenth, seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, Gujarat was unquestionably the most renowned source of commercial embroidery in the world. Its reputation in Europe was first established in the thirteenth century when Marco Polo praised the embroidered leatherwork of this part of India. Records of the East India Company show how much in demand they were, right from the start, and by the later seventeenth century a craze developed in Europe, particularly in Britain and Holland, for complete sets of Indian room furnishings in chintz, embroidery or a combination of both techniques. A complete set of furnishings for a grand room might comprise wall-hangings, bed-curtains with valances and coverlet, perhaps

matching chair and cushions covers and small carpets to surround the bed. The designs were often related to contemporary English Jacobean or Queen Anne embroidery consisting of exotic flowers and leaves incorporated into Indian designs. The earliest and most beautiful surviving sets of furnishings of this type are probably those from Ashburnham House in Sussex (c1690-1700), now dispersed between the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad and several private collections.

ProvenanceSir Henry Tate

LiteratureCampen, J.van & Hartkamp-Jonxis, E., Asian Splendour – Company Art in the Rijksmuseun, Amsterdam, 2011Crill, R., Indian Embroidery, V&A Publications, London, 1999Crill, R,. Guy, J. Murphy, V. et al., Arts of India 1550-1900, V&A Publications, London, 1990Hamilton, A., New account of the East Indies, London, ed.1930Irwin, J. & Hall, M. Indian Embroideries, Historic Textiles of India at the Calico Museum, vol II, 1973Irwin, J., ‘The Commercial Embroidery of Gujerat in the Seventeenth Century’ in Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, no.17, 1949

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Enamelled plateNorth India, c. 1750-80Inscribed in Persian on reverse: Mir Muzaffar Husayn Khan Sahib and Rahim al-Nisa Begum Sahiba and below tola 21Silver with champlevé enamelsDiameter: 16.75 cm

A small plate of champlevé enamel on silver decorated with a trellis design of yellow and blue flowers of decreasing size on a dark green background, surrounding a central circle with a stylized eight petalled flower in yellow, green and dark blue.

Mughal enamelled courtly objects from the 17th and 18th century are rare and therefore comparisons are difficult to find. The enamelled decoration of a central stylized flower and flowering plants on the base of the Clive hookah (Zebrowski 1997, figs.61-64; see image above courtesy of Robert Skelton) have similarities of colour and composition to the flowers and central medallion of our plate. The Clive hookah set has been associated with Lucknow in North India and dated to the 18th century. It was in the Clive Collection by 1766.

Rahim al-Nisa Begum (b.1842) was the mother of Mir Muzaffa Husayn Khan (b.1866), the Nawwab of Surat in Gujarat. A tola or tolaka is an Indian weight, the same as a suvarna.

ProvenancePrivate collection, England

LiteratureCarvalho, P.M., Gems and Jewels of Mughal India, Alexandria Press, London, 2010Zebrowski, M., Gold, Silver & Bronze from Mughal India, London, 1997

Base of Clive enammeled hookah on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo Courtesy of Robert Skelton

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A globular-shaped silver-gilt huqqa base with champlevé enamel in the Musée Guimet in Paris (ex collection Krishna Riboud) is stylistically similar to our spice box. A field of dark green is decorated with staggered rows of small, five petalled flowers in white on a yellow stem (Zebrowski 2000, no 86). The detailed enamelling on the base of the Clive hookah (Zebrowski, 1997, nos 61-64) bears similarities in design and colour scheme to the plate (cat.28). This hookah set was in the Clive Collection by 1766.

Although the foundations to the study of Indian courtly enamel-work have been set, a great deal of further research is necessary. Robert Skelton has made reference to a mid 19th century enamelled spice box from Dholepur, in Rajasthan, which was acquired at the Great Exhibition of 1851 for the South Kensington Museum (V&A 131-1852).

ProvenancePrivate collection, England

LiteratureCarvalho, P.M., Gems and Jewels of Mughal India, London, 2010Zebrowski, M. Gold, Silver & Bronze from Mughal India, Alexandria Press, London, 1997

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Enamelled Spice BoxNorth India, c.1750-80Inscribed in Persian on reverse: Mir Muzaffar Husayn Khan , ownerSilver with champlevé enamels, diamond, carved emerald and foiled stonesLength: 16 cm, height: 6.5 cm

A rare spice box of champlevé enamel on silver consisting of four lobed compartments held together by a central screw with cuplike handle surrounded by 18 tiny ovoid beryls and set with a large half mellon shaped pale green beryl with a small diamond finial. The enamel decoration consists of seven petalled yellow and blue flowers growing from pale green serrated leaves on a dark green ground. These four compartments are further embellished with silver wire and foiled crystals set into a small silver flower.

The inscription is identical to one of those on the similarly decorated plate (cat. 28), from the same private English collection, which bears the names of the Nawab of Gujarat, Mir Muzaffar Husayn Khan (b.1866) and his mother, Rahima al-Nisa Begum (b.1842).

‘Indian enamels are usually of the champléve type, where the oxide paste is applied to the excavated metal surface. The object is then subjected to intense heat in a furnace, but as each colour fuses at a different temperature, repeated firings are necessary to produce the entire colour range. Obviously, a great craftsman with substantial knowledge and skill is needed. The colours with the highest melting points are applied first, those with the lowest last, lest the progressive firings melt the colours already applied’ (Zebrowski 1997,p. 4).

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EwerDeccan or South India, 18th centuryBrassHeight: 27 cm

A brass ewer with exaggerated pear-shaped body, with flat circular panels on either side and facetted handle and spout, the spout terminating in a flower head. The neck is incised with stylized leaves and the top is crescent shaped with incised fish decoration. The handle is attached to the body with a crescent shape engraved with four fish and a further applied incised floral motif.

Fish were already used in the decoration of secular vessels during the Mughal period. For example, the mural paintings in the tomb of Itimad ud dawlah in Agra, built in 1628, show a vase of flowers decorated with fish in different combinations

(Zebrowski 1997, no 297). Similar treatment of the flower headed spout also appears in an 18th century brass lota from Central India (Zebrowski 1997, pl 520, no 340) while a ewer from Tanjore in South India has similar decoration of flat circular panels on a rounded belly (Zebrowski 1997, no 219). The voluptuous, slightly exaggerated but balanced composition of this ewer would indicate a Central or South Indian provenance.

LiteratureZebrowski, M. Gold, Silver & Bronze from Mughal India, 1997

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A Young Nobleman Enjoying Holi with his CourtFaizabad or Lucknow, 1760-65, attributed to NidhamalOpaque watercolour and gold on paper31.2 x 20.5 cm

In this exquisite picture, depicting a musical interlude in the playing of Holi, a young Nawab is enjoying a dancing performance on a terrace with his favourite womenfolk, nine of whom sit alongside him. They are sharing several hookahs. Piles of sweetmeats are placed in front of them while attendants behind them bring more. Across the terrace a young woman performs a solo dance to the accompaniment of female voices and male musicians. In the foreground other members of the Nawab’s entourage enjoy the performance. Two yoginis stand out with their darker skin and pink and green garments. Otherwise everything is coloured red and yellow from the powders and liquids which they have all been hurling at each other in the riotous spring festival of Holi. Even the fountains and the lakes have turned red. In the fairytale world of Avadhi painting, all men are young and handsome and all girls young and beautiful, there is little room for the old or not quite so beautiful, so the old duenna beside the women and a grey haired musician opposite strike a somewhat unexpected note. The picture seems slightly unfinished at the top where there is an area of blank paper.

The exquisite detail and refinement of this painting immediately suggest the work of Nidhamal, an artist known from Mughal Delhi (e.g. Falk and Archer 1981, no. 190; Binney 1973, no. 77). John Seyller has recently republished an important painting of Amir Khan ‘Umdat al-Mulk c. 1745 enjoying a hookah on a terrace, previously attributed to Hunhar, as actually ascribed to his brother Nidhamal (Seyller and Seitz, no. 21). In reply to a letter dated 1772 from the Maratha vizier Nana Phadnavis specifically seeking paintings by Nidhamal, a Maratha functionary in Delhi informs him that that artist had some time ago gone to Lucknow and died there (Falk and Archer 1981, p. 122). This departure was presumably after the flight of the heir apparent Shah ‘Alam eastwards in 1758 when many other artists left Delhi for safer pastures.

Nidhamal’s Lucknow career is documented by securely ascribed paintings. The same nobleman appears elsewhere in Faizabad/Lucknow paintings in two paintings also by Nidhamal. In a painting now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Markel and Gude 2010, fig. 21) he is with his ladies enjoying music on a terrace. In another now in the Cynthia Polsky collection, New York (ibid., no. 20) the same nobleman appears reclining on a bed surrounded by his womenfolk longing for his absent lover. Nidhamal’s Avadh paintings of noblemen can be dated 1760-65. Points of similarity to our Nawab include the small moustache, the turban style with

the bulge for the hair high up on his head, the same slightly curved nose, and the hairline. Our prince has a slightly longer moustache, indicating a slightly older age than in the two ascribed paintings by Nidhamal, and appears here without an aigrette in his turban and earrings, but he has presumably dressed down a little for Holi.

Whether the main figure is an actual portrait rather than a generic type is perhaps open to question. Despite his general resemblance to a portrait of the handsome and relatively young Nawab Mir Qasim of Bengal c. 1765 in the Islamisches Museum, Berlin (Losty 2002, fig. 7), that prince wears a traditional Mughal style turban, has a straight nose and an altogether more authoritative air. The same is true of portraits of Nawab Siraj al-Daula (r. 1755-56) who was called the handsomest man in Bengal (see Weber 1982, fig. 49 for one of his best portraits). One of the few identified Avadhi noblemen in such paintings appears with a lady on a terrace in the Gentil collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, labelled by Gentil as Shuja Quli Khan (Schmitz 2002, Introduction fig. 4; Hurel 2008, no. 153; Markel and Gude 2010, no. 141), while another portrait of the same nobleman attributed to Nidhamal passed through the London salerooms (Schmitz 2002, Introduction fig. 3). He may be eliminated as our figure on account of his longer moustache, his receding hair line visible beneath his turban, and also his distinctive turban shape with a large bulge towards the back rather than higher up to receive the hair. He was killed at the Battle of Buxar in 1764. As for the Nawab Vizier Shuja’ al-Daula himself, his moustache even in his youngest portrait by Sital Singh c. 1755 (Hurel 2008, no. 152) is more developed.

Even in a picture of him playing Holi (see below) he is wearing a Mughal style turban with the turbanband or gospech associated with Avadhi court dress. He normally also wears the open half-length coat identified by Rosemary Crill as Persian (Markel and Gude 2010, p. 229). His all-pervading presence in Avadh, however, is suggested here by the drummer on the extreme right, who is sporting the type of luxuriant moustache favoured by Shuja al-Daula.

Two more remarkable Holi scenes from Avadh of Shuja’ al-Daula enjoying Holi by Gobind Singh c. 1765 and another of Asaf al-Daula doing the same attributed to Mir Kalan Khan are in a private collection in London (Roy 2009, figs. 23 and 62). A very similar painting of a nobleman enjoying Holi in his court formerly in the Stuart Cary Welch collection and now in the Art Institute of Chicago (Sotheby’s 2011, lot 110; Kossak 1997, no. 67; Welch 1973, no. 69) offers an interesting

comparison. This has been catalogued as Lucknow c. 1765 but the newly published inscription on the back, W.F. 1764, indicating that the painting was in the collection of William Fullerton, the surgeon at Patna in 1764, rules this out. All of Fullerton’s contemporary paintings were from Murshidabad or Patna. The nobleman’s features are very similar to ours but the colour scheme, facial types, and the lack of individualization indicates that it was painted by a Murshidabad artist either there or in Patna where Mir Qasim set up his temporary capital in the brief war with the East India Company 1763-64.

LiteratureBinney, E., 3rd, Indian Miniature Painting from the Collection of Edwin Binney, 3rd: the Mughal and Deccani Schools, Portland, 1973Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Kossak, S., Indian Court Painting 16th – 19th century, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1997Losty, J.P., ‘Towards a New Naturalism: Portraiture in

Murshidabad and Avadh 1750-80’, in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. B. Schmitz, Bombay, 2002, pp. 34-55Markel, S., and Gude, T.B., India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, Prestel Publishing, New York, 2010Roy, Malini, The Artist Mihr Chand son of Ganga Ram (fl. 1759-86): Idiosyncrasies in the Late Mughal Painting Tradition, Ph. D. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2009Schmitz, B., After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Marg Publications, Bombay, 2002Seyller, J., and Seitz, K., Mughal and Deccani Paintings, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 2010Sotheby’s, The Stuart Cary Welch Collection Part Two: Arts of India¸ London, 31 May 2011Weber, R., Porträts und historische Darstellungen in der Miniaturensammlung des Museums für Indische Kunst Berlin, Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin, 1982Welch, S.C., A Flower from Every Meadow: Indian Paintings from American Collections, Asia Society New York, 1973

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Nobleman on a Terrace Lucknow, c. 1775, in the style of Mihr Chand, from the Polier AlbumCommissioned by Col. Antoine Polier decorated with large sprays of stylized blue and orange flowers. On the verso calligraphic verses signed by Muhammad ‘Ali and dated 1195/1781Opaque watercolour and gold laid down in an album pageAlbum Page: 39.4 x 27.7 cm; painting: 17.5 x 12.5 cm

The bearded nobleman is sitting on a carpet on a terrace smoking a hookah. Beyond the landscape gently rises and falls on either side of a river, the crest of each hillside being lined with trees, each with shadows, in the manner of Dip Chand and Mihr Chand. This type of more naturalistic landscape becaming increasingly the norm in the Provincial Mughal schools at Lucknow and Murshidabad as in the context of late Mughal artists’ increasing concern with the naturalistic depiction of space (discussed in Losty 2002).

The nobleman’s appearance recalls that of one of the Mughal commanders in Aurangzeb’s time, the Afghan Aziz Khan Chagata, whose portrait is known from various contemporary (Falk and Archer 1981, no. 134ii, by Chhajmal) and later Avadhi (ibid., no. 269, by Hunhar II) and Deccani copies (ibid., no. 430, by Gobind Rai). He is normally depicted with sword and shield close by, but here he appears more pacific. The painting comes from one of the albums put together by the Swiss patron Col. Antoine Louis Henri

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Chand for him to colour them, add a background and then have his other craftsmen mount them in the kind of exuberant album pages which characterise his entire collection.

ProvenanceCol. Antoine PolierSir Thomas PhillippsThe Robinson Trust

LiteratureLosty, J.P., ‘Towards a New Naturalism: Portraiture in Murshidabad and Avadh 1750-80’, in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. B. Schmitz, Bombay, 2002, pp. 34-55Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1981Polier, Antoine, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: the I’jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773-79) of Antoine-Louis-Henri Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, trans. and ed. by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, Delhi, 2001Sotheby’s. Bibliotheca Phillippica, London, 27 November 1974, lot 740

de Polier (1741-95). He arrived in India in 1757 working initially for the French East India Company but transferred his allegiance to the English Company at the end of the Seven Years War. He was a military engineer and architect and eventually worked in those capacities for the Nawab Vizier of Avadh Shuja’ al-Daula and his successor Asaf al-Daula. His collection of albums was sold to the English collector William Beckford, and then passed to his daughter the Duchess of Hamilton. They are now mostly in two museums in Berlin, although various albums at different times were either given by Polier to his friends in India such as Lady Coote, now in the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, or the artist Ozias Humphry, now in the British Museum. Others like this one that ended up in the Phillipps collection, who bought it from the bookseller Howell & Stewart in 1834, seemed to have left the collection before Beckford bought the others.

Unlike many Provincial Mughal portraits from Avadh in Polier’s collection, this portrait seems all of a piece. Other portraits we know from Polier’s Persian correspondence (Polier 2001) were originally Mughal seventeenth century drawings which he acquired when he was in Delhi 1775-80 and thought were unfinished. He sent them to his retained artist Mihr Cat. 32, verso

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Radha and Krishna in a Garden PavilionKishangarh, after a painting by Nihal Chand, c. 1760Inscribed on the verso with a Hindi verse:Gaur pith abhiram syam gahi gunthat bainiTiya phir anjan det kanval nainni mriga nainni (‘That handsome dark one took hold of that fair complexioned Radha and made her braid. Then that doe-eyed damsel applied kohl to her lotus shaped eyes’ traslation by Harsh Dehejia).Opaque watercolour and gold on paper33 x 24.1 cm

The Mughal artist Bhavani Das, who painted imperial portraits under Bahadur Shah, came to Kishangarh in 1719 under Raja Raj Singh (reg. 1706-1748). He was followed by his son Dalchand, who also painted in Jodhpur, and nephew Kalyandas in 1725-1726. These artists brought the latest Mughal style to Kishangarh and profoundly influenced the development of the Kishangarh style towards an expressive naturalism in the reign of Raj Singh. He and his son Savant Singh (reg. 1748-1757) were both devotees of Krishna. Raja Savant Singh from his youth patronised the artist Nihal Chand, who created lyrical masterpieces in idyllic settings corresponding to the idealised sacred places of Braj from about 1735 onwards, corresponding often to the ecstatic poems of the Raja who wrote bhakti or devotional poetry under the name of Nagaridas. Those paintings that came from the former Kishangarh durbar are now mostly in the National Museum, New Delhi (see Dickinson and Khandalavala 1959, and Mathur 2000). The occurrence of major Kishangarh paintings in western collections is therefore extremely rare.

Our painting is very similar to one in the National Museum, New Delhi, from the former Kishangarh durbar, which has been reliably attributed to Nihal Chand by Dickinson and Khandalavala (1959, pl. XIII) and dated there to 1742-57. Khandalavala in a later publication (1971, pl. V) narrows the dating to 1742-48. On the back of that painting are verses from the Braj Sur written in 1742 by Nagaridas treating of a particular type of woman, one whose beauty so entrances her lover that he is unable to give her the pan he has prepared for her.

Our painting seems like one sold in New York (Sotheby’s 6 October 1990 lot 41) to be slightly later versions of paintings by Nihal Chand in continuation of the one in the National Museum. In our painting Krishna and Radha are seated in the veranda of a white pavilion. Both have long black hair that streams and curls down their backs. Her lower body is turned away from him but she turns her upper body round and shyly moves her hand towards his chest. He appears to have both his hands behind her back and is unbraiding her hair. An attendant behind Radha is waving a punkah over her giving her the kind of aureole seen round divine or royal faces. Various attendant gopis are in the veranda, one stands behind Krishna with a morchhal, while others bring delicacies or sing. Two girls on the terrace below entwine themselves round plantain trees suggestively. Behind the usual for Kishangarh plantain grove to the side is the kind of verdant grove seen in a similar painting now in the San Diego Museum (Goswamy and Smith 2005, no. 32).

Nihal Chand increasingly distorted the human figure to

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create an ecstatic expressiveness corresponding to the religious and poetical fervour of the poems of his royal master. Krishna and Radha are both depicted with impossibly slender waists, arching backs and sloping profiles with huge eyes upturned at the corner (the Radha figure supposedly based on Savant Singh’s mistress Bani Thani). Nihal Chand still placed his figures in the naturalistic architectural or landscape surrounds derived from Muhammad Shah period painting, but in the hands of his artistic descendants the earlier concern with naturalistic figural painting slowly hardened into the more abstract forms favoured generally by Rajput artists.

Bhavani Das and Dalchand brought the latest styles of architectural depiction from Muhammad Shah’s court to Jodhpur and to Kishangarh, but in both courts later artists turned proper architecture into fantasy as in the paintings associated with Bakhat Singh at Nagaur (Diamond et al. 2008, no. 15). Impossibly attenuated Shahjahani columns turned into cypress trees as here could not bear the weight of the arcade superimposed upon them, but are part of the Kishangarh style just as the features of Radha and Krishna are distorted for expressive purposes. Here the facets of the columns, the soffits and spandrels of the arches, and the walls round the jewel-edged openings into the interior of the pavilion have all been decorated with silver paint. The arched openings behind have flames emanating from them, symbols perhaps of the passion of Radha and Krishna.

While Nihal Chand’s finest work is associated with the patronage of Savant Singh up to 1757, nonetheless he himself worked in the Kishangarh studio until at least 1773 (Dickinson and Khandalavala, p. 16). His son Sitaram and other artists were also active in the court studio in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It is difficult therefore to be specific about attributions in the absence of inscriptions. A published painting ascribed to Sitaram in the Cleveland Museum (Leach 1986, no. 71) is obviously based on the work of his father (Mathur 2000, no. 3) and this may be the case with our painting, but it might also be the case that this is the work of Nihal Chand in his later phase.

literatureDiamond, D., Glynn, C., and Jasol, K.S., Garden & Cosmos: the Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, Thames & Hudson, London, 2008Dickinson, E., and Khandalavala, K., Kishangarh Painting, Lalit Kala, New Delhi, 1959Goswamy, B.N., and Smith, Caron, Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting, San Diego Museum of Art, 2005Haidar, N., ‘Nihal Chand’, in Beach, M.C., Fischer, E., and Goswamy, B.N., Masters of Indian Painting, Artibus Asiae, Zurich, 2011, pp. 595-606Khandalavala, K., Kishangarh Painting, Lalit Kala, New Delhi, 1971Leach, L.Y., Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings: the Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Oriental Art, Part One, The Cleveland Museum of Art., Cleveland, 1986Mathur, V.K., Marvels of Kishangarh Painting from the Collection of the National Museum, New Delhi, Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, Delhi, 2000

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the Amar Vilas (Topsfield 2002, fig. 137 for example). The figures, however, are more reminiscent of Jodhpur painting, although under some Mewar influence. Crill (2000, figs. 30-31) draws attention to that influence on Jodhpur painting in the reign of Ajit Singh (reg. 1679-1724), who grew up in Mewar and married a Mewar princess in 1694 (ibid., pp. 58-59). Indeed he would have known the new Amar Vilas as it was being built by Rana Amar Singh (1698-1710).

Mewar epic princes in eighteenth century painting wear a crown with a single central peak unlike here, where all the kings and princes have three peaks as can be seen in Jodhpur painting (Diamond et al. 2008, no. 28). The ladies with a lock brought forwards to dangle before their ears are seen in Jodhpur painting in the mid-century (e.g. Crill 2000, fig. 71). Tall trees arranged in rows with starry blossoms and herons dancing through them are likewise found at Nagaur and Jodhpur (Diamond et al. 2008, nos. 11, 16, 18, 23). The painting however is not in the Jodhpur court style of Abhai Singh (reg. 1724-49), which had come under contemporary Mughal influence with artists such as Dalchand, but would seem to come from elsewhere within Marwar where the style of the Ajit Singh period continued up until the mid-century.

ProvenanceJohn Hewitt

LiteratureCrill, R., Marwar Painting: a History of the Jodhpur Style, India Book House Ltd., Bombay, 2000Diamond, D., Glynn, C., and Jasol, K.S., Garden & Cosmos: the Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, Thames & Hudson, London, 2008Topsfield, A., Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar, Artibus Asiae, Zurich, 2002

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A Scene in a HeavenMarwar, 1725-50Opaque watercolour and gold on cotton75 x 53 cm

The artist is using a representation of a towering Rajput palace surrounded by a fortified walled garden to tell a story of which the subject is not at present clear. The palace is four stories high with older and darker structures below. At the bottom right two crowned boys seek entry into the garden that surrounds the palace. The plethora of crowned figures suggests that these are divinities rather than princes and that the palace is in some respects a kind of heaven. It is possible that the painting represents a Jain parable relating to the Jain belief in rebirth over countless existences and within countless heavens and universes before attaining final release.

On the ground floor to the left a lady gives birth to two babies and a king or divinity offers thanks at the temple. In the middle a king or divinity is reading and being visited by another princely figure king with two boy princes. On the right the two boy princes are ringing the bell. The next storey up contains a great pillared durbar hall where a four-armed and crowned divinity is being worshipped by assembled divinities while outside drummers beat their drums, possibly representing the heaven enjoyed by one reborn as Indra. In the next storey up a god now only two armed is being entertained by female divinities with music and dancing, perhaps the heavenly delights enjoyed by one reborn as Indra, while our two crowned boys talk to each other on the right. In the topmost story which is crowned by flag-bedecked chattris a king or divinity has two princely young men before him while women with chowries wait at the sides.

The towering palace here, however, is not at all like the solid homogenous structure of the Jodhpur palace (e.g. Crill 2000, fig. 99). It most vividly recalls the palace at Udaipur which similarly rises from relatively plain walls in the first two storeys to more elaborate outward projections of balconies and upward thrusts of cupolas on the top storey, over both the main older structure and to the north where it is crowned by

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Eighteenth Century View of Bombay By A Vander Steen, 1782Inscribed on the reverse: A View of Bombay and the black town Dungaree taken from Mazagan Hill. A. vander Steen delt. 1782. References a Bombay Castle b Fort George c Old Woman’s Island d Dungaree or black town e Mazagon HillPencil and wash on paper36.6 x 53.8 cm

This is one of the earliest known drawings of Bombay. To those who know the modern city, little can prepare one for a view of the original miniscule settlement and the way the seven islands were originally separated by the sea. Fort George, occupying the south-east tip of the H-shaped Bombay Island, is in the middle ground of the picture with the Factory building and church of St Thomas prominent, inside the fortified wall, the area still known as the Fort. Colaba and its lighthouse are beyond with Old Woman’s Island between it and Bombay Island. A narrow strip of land and marshes (the Flats) with a windmill link it to the Indian area of the city then called Dongri rising up on the right to the present Malabar and Cumballa hills. Mazagaon is the next island to the north of Bombay Island with a hill from which many of the early views of Bombay are taken. Reclamation work to win land from the water that surged between the islands at high tide was begun by the Portuguese and continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even now goes on.

Nothing is known of A Vander Steen the artist, who is obviously of Dutch or Flemish origin but whose ancestors may have settled in England in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Four of his drawings all dated 1782 are in the India Office collections in the British Library, although the name has been misread as vander Heen (Archer 1969, pp. 228-29). Three are of Thana at the top of Bombay harbour and the other is of Surat. Van der Steen may have been a ship’s officer in an East Indiaman.

The view is ten years earlier than the most famous of the early views of Bombay, those taken by James Wales 1791-95 and published in 1800 as Twelve Views of the Island of Bombay and its Vicinity, London, 1800. For other early views of Bombay see Rohatgi et al. 1997.

LiteratureArcher, M., British Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1969Rohatgi, P., Godrej P., and Mehrotra, R., Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives, Marg Publications, Mumbai, 1997.

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Cat. 35, inscription verso

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A Hindu FestivalAttributed to Sevak Ram, Patna, 1800-05Inscribed on the reverse: Joloyogee Breakfast. With an old label identifying the festival with that of Makar Sankranti, the start of the Hindu New Year in MarchWatercolour, gouache and gold on paper40.3 x 59 cm

The scene is set round a square tank surrounded by steps down which people are moving to bathe in the waters. Booths have been set up round the perimeter of the tank for the sale of foodstuffs. A crowd has gathered in the foreground along the near side of the tank, some arriving on elephant back or in a bullock cart or palanquin. A large tree on the left towers over the proceedings in the approved ‘Picturesque’ manner, acting as a repoussoir. The meaning of the original inscription on the reverse (‘Joloyogee Breakfast’) is by no means clear other than that food is being consumed, as it would be at any major Hindu bathing festival. It is probably the Chait new year festival at which women enter the water to offer fruit.

Patna had appeared briefly on the Indian artistic horizon in the early 1760s, but nothing else is known to have been done there until the 1790s with a series of festival scenes and interiors done for one E.E. Pote (Archer 1972, no. 65i-viii). They follow late Mughal conventions for compositions but are done in plain watercolour. Soon Patna artists added gouache or bodycolour to their technical repertoire to achieve a more brilliant finish. The best known artist of this Patna style is Sevak Ram, who early in the nineteenth century painted different series of large festival scenes for various British patrons. Sevak Ram had obviously studied closely the works of the various British artists as they went up and down the river over the previous thirty years. He lowered his viewpoint down to the normal spectator level thereby demonstrating his mastery of crowd scenes and enlivened his paintings by including individualised figure studies in the foreground, as can be seen here.

The painting comes from an album of fourteen drawings of Hindu festivals and ceremonies by the same hand, originally mounted up on paper containing watermarks J. Whatman

1813. One drawing from the series depicting a Kali Puja procession is in the British Library, Add.Or.4300. Another was exhibited in London in 2007 (Losty and Galloway 2007, no. 38). The album closely resembles that acquired by the Earl of Minto when Governor-General 1807-12 now divided between three institutions (Archer 1972, no. 68, i-v; Archer 1992, no. 49; and Leach 1995, no. 74.2-3). The paintings from the present set are somewhat larger than the Minto set and appear to be slightly earlier.

The first Earl of Caledon was born plain James Alexander (1730-1802), Madras Civil Service 1752-63, and Bengal Civil Service 1767-71. He was Chief at Patna in 1770, and at Murshidabad in 1771, and returned home by 1773, where he was created Baron in 1790 and Earl of Caledon in 1800. His son the second earl, Du Pré Alexander, was Governor of the Cape of Good Hope 1806-11, and may have acquired the album at this time from transient Britons on furlough from India or else returning home.

ProvenanceEarls of CaledonEyre and Hobhouse, Company Painting, June 1982, nos. 6-19

LiteratureArcher, M., Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992Archer, M., Company Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1972Leach, L.Y., Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995Losty, J.P., and Galloway, F., Sringar: an Exhibition celebrating Divine and Erotic Love¸ Francesca Galloway, London, 2007

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size and their unusual subjects. For other drawings from this set see Hartnoll and Eyre exhibition catalogue Indian painting for the British, 1770-1880 (cat. 24, 1972, 1-16) and Sotheby’s S C Welch sale lots 116-18.

This particular drawing is distinguished by its large size and its apparent faithfulness to its subject. The large cactus is depicted in meticulous detail from the modelling of its multi-lobed body to the prickles with which it is covered. The artist seems to have given us the budding flower, its inflorescence and then its decay, all in the one specimen.

literatureArcher, M., Natural History Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1962Leach, L.Y., Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995Sotheby’s, The Stuart Cary Welch Collection Part Two: Arts of India¸ London, 31 May 2011Welch, S.C., Room for Wonder: Indian painting during the British Period, American Federation of Arts, New York, 1978

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A Cactus Plant in FlowerCalcutta, c. 1800Opaque watercolour on paper87.9 x 45.9 cm

At the end of the eighteenth century, Bengal artists were patronised by the British chiefly for ‘history paintings’ of festivals, for topographical drawings of Indian monuments and their own houses, for Indian types and especially for natural history drawings (Archer 1962). Lady Impey (1749-1818) famously employed three Murshidabad artists, Shaykh Zain al-Din, Bhawani Das and Ram Das, who all got to Calcutta by way of Patna, to prepare several hundred drawings of the birds, flora and fauna in her gardens in Calcutta between 1774 and 1783. Despite the foreign influences from European scientific drawings and Chinese decorative paintings, these are still late Mughal paintings. Their technique was transmitted to various Calcutta artists who by 1795 were painting the thousands of specimens collected at the Company’s botanical gardens at Sibpur as well as in the Barrackpore Menagerie series from 1805 (ibid., pp. 20-23). Some of these artists were also preparing drawings done at this time for discriminating private collectors such as Lord Valentia and James Nathaniel Rind (Welch 1978, nos. 12-14, 17-18; Leach 1995, 761-762). Rind’s drawings in particular are characterised by their

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An Impeyan PheasantCalcutta, c. 1803Inscribed lower left: No. 69 and lower right: Impeyan Pheasant. 1819-4 ... from LifeWatercolour and bodycolour on paper48.8 x 58 cm

George Annesley, second Earl of Mountnorris and ninth Viscount Valentia (1770-1844) finding travel in Europe denied him on account of the Revolutionary Wars, travelled to the east instead, reaching Calcutta in January 1803. From there he went up-country as far as Lucknow before returning to Calcutta and visiting southern India, Ceylon and Bombay. On his way home he visited Abyssinia as it was then called and Egypt. His journal of his travels was published in London in 1809 as Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt in 1802-1806 illustrated with plates taken from the drawings of his secretary and draughtsman Henry Salt (1780-1827), who also published his own drawings later under the title Twenty-four views taken in St Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt (London, 1809). Many of Salt’s original drawings, sketches and worked up drawings for his book are in the India Office collections in the British Library (Archer 1969, pp. 627-32).

Although he scarcely mentions it, Valentia seems to have been something of a bird man, as he made a collection of bird drawings when in northern India, some of them among the finest known such studies, but the collection as a whole is variable in quality. Valentia often refers to the plants of India in knowledgeable terms, and reports glowingly on the Botanic Garden at Sibpur under Dr. Roxburgh, but makes no mention of commissioning natural history drawings or being presented with them in Calcutta, although he was presented with some drawings of seeds by Dr.Heyne at Bangalore in 1804 (Archer 1962, p. 28). Two drawings with Valentia's Persian seal but of indifferent quality appear in the Wellesley Collection of natural history drawings in the India Office collections (Archer 1962, p. 96). The East India Company had set up a botanic garden at Sibpur and under William Roxburgh from 1795 employed Calcutta draughtsmen to record the plant specimens (the so-called Roxburgh Icones, nearly 3000 of them and now at Kew). Roxburgh would not allow his draughtsmen to sign their work but we know the names of some of them because the artists were borrowed by Dr Francis Buchanan in 1804-05 to draw the birds and mammals in the Barrackpore menagerie that had been set up by Marquess Wellesley during his governor-generalship in Calcutta 1798-1805. The artists Gurudayal and Haludar have been suggested as the artists of some of the finest of the Valentia birds, which presupposes that these artists were able to work free-lance, which seems unlikely. Wellesley of course in his munificent way may simply have presented some of his own best drawings to Valentia. For some of the finest bird drawings from Valentia’s collection, see Welch 1976 no. 26; Welch 1978, nos.18a-c; Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox 1991; and Leach 1995, 760-2. A large number was sold at Sotheby’s London 10 April 1989 lots 5-21. Three more were sold in the sale West East the Niall Hobhouse Collection, Christie’s 22 May 2008, lots 10-12 including an Impeyen Pheasant without a painted ground.

Most of the Valentia bird drawings show the specimen

either perched on a branch or twig or else if large standing but without any painted ground. This is one of the few that has a coloured ground for the bird to stand on. These artists were the inheritors of the earlier Mughal tradition of bird and animal drawings associated with the name of Ustad Mansur under Jahangir (1605-27). They used the Mughal technique of building up the bird’s body feather by feather, creating passages of iridescent brilliance, but also suggesting the volumes of the bird’s body beneath. Their meticulous art had been revived for Lady Impey in Calcutta in her drawings of birds and other subjects done for her 1777-82 by Shaikh Zain al-Din, Bhawani Das and Ram Das and obviously continued with the finest of the Calcutta artists who worked for Roxburgh, Wellesley, Valentia and Buchanan. Every feather is meticulously detailed line by line using this technique to build up the body of the bird which is then given polish and sheen through burnishing and varnishing. The Impeyan Pheasant or Danphe is more scientifically known as the Himalayan Monal, Lophophorus impejanus also known as the Impeyan Monal. It is a bird of genus Lophophorus of the pheasant family, Phasianidae. The scientific name commemorates Lady Impey, the wife owf the British chief justice of Bengal, Sir Elijah Impey. Her ornithological interest popularised for the table the Himalayan pheasant which was named after her. As well as being a patron of natural history artists, Lady Impey also contributed to scientific knowledge. The bird drawings sometimes include the earliest depictions of Indian species, and were used by subsequent ornithologists to identify new species or new habitats for existing ones. John Latham (in his 1787 Supplement) often refers to the drawings of Lady Impey, whose authority he cites for information on both habitat and Indian name.

ProvenanceLord ValentiaNiall Hobhouse

Literature:Archer, M., Natural History Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1962Archer, M., British Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1969Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, Indian Paintings for British Patrons 1770-1860, London, 1991Leach, L.Y., Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995Sotheby’s, The Stuart Cary Welch Collection Part Two: Arts of India¸ London, 31 May 2011Welch, S.C., Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches, Asia Society, New York, 1976Welch, S.C., Room for Wonder: Indian painting during the British Period, American Federation of Arts, New York, 1978

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with a number of young men, their sons. All these Rohillas were well dressed, and were good-looking men in general ... Their retinue, however, was composed of fine men, well appointed.”

Hafiz Rahmat Khan, the Regent of Rohilkhand 1749-74, had amassed a famous library and paintings collection at Bareilly, much of which passed into the hands of Shuja’ al-Daula of Avadh after the Regent’s defeat and death in the so-called Rohilla War of 1774. The Nawab Faizallah Khan (r. 1748-93), who then became the de facto Rohilla leader, again began to assemble another famous collection. This eventually became the Raza Library which is still in the palace at Rampur. He and his successors seem not to have patronized contemporary artists until later in the nineteenth century. The Raza Library has a few illustrated manuscripts from Rampur in the second half of the nineteenth century (Schmitz and Desai 2006, pp. 119-23)

Two great processional scenes with the Nawab of Rampur are now known, one in the British Library datable to 1859 (published Losty1993) and the other in the Khalili Collection c. 1864 (Leach 1998, no. 61), but they seem to be by Delhi artists. Our artist too must come from Delhi with the latest ideas in Indian portraiture. The artist continues the naturalistic innovations of the Fraser Album portraits of 1815-19 (Archer and Falk 1989) with the confident, natural pose or rather swagger, and the gaze straight out of the picture at the viewer, but the gold background and blue sky above put the subject more into a traditional Mughal format.

LiteratureArcher, M., Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992Archer, M., and Falk, T., India Revealed: the Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35, Cassell, London, 1989Hasting, 1st Marquess of, The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings, K.G., ed. by the Marchioness of Bute, London, 1858Leach, L.Y., Paintings from India: the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. VIII, Nour Foundation, London, 1998Losty, J.P., Of Far Off Lands and People: Paintings from India 1783-1881, Indar Pasricha Fine Art exhibition catalogue, London, 1993 Schmitz, B., and Desai, Z.A., Mughal and Persian Paintings and Illustrated Manuscripts in the Raza Library, Rampur, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, 2006

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Portrait of a Rohilla AfghanDelhi, 1821-22Inscribed on reverse in nagari: Phateyav Khan pisare Ahmad Bakhs Khan Barech// sam 1878 mah 5 (literally: Fatehyab Khan son Ahmad Bakhsh Khan Barech, Samvat 1878/1821-22, month 5]Opaque watercolor and gold on paperFolio: 27.3 x 16.5 cm; painting: 25.7 x 15 cm

A young man with long curly hair down to his shoulders stands on a hillside in a swaggering pose, one hand on his hip, the other on his sword hilt, with a slightly questioning look in his face as he stares out from the picture plane. He is wearing a black and gold cap, a blue angarkha (front fastening gown) with a patterned cummerbund round his waist, boots, and over all a long open coat with short sleeves striped in a red and gold pattern. The coat has a fur lining that hangs down from inside the short sleeves over the blue sleeves of his angarkha.

The inscription unusually for a Muslim subject who would have spoken Pushtu and Urdu is inscribed in nagari and presumably written far from his home. It seems an attempt to transliterate an Urdu inscription but there seems to be no grammatical connection between the parts, so he could be either Ahmad Bakhsh Khan son of Fatehyab Khan or vice versa. It does however identify the young man as a Barech, signifying one of the Pathan tribes which settled in what was called Rohilkhand now in western Uttar Pradesh where they were generally termed Rohillas, reflecting their mountainous ancestry. They had a turbulent history in Rohilkhand in the later eighteenth century, being hammered by Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Marathas, the Nawabs of Avadh and the East India Company, before finally signing a treaty with the latter power in 1801 when Rohilkhand was ceded to the Company by the Nawab of Avadh, under which the head of the house became the Nawab of the greatly reduced state of Rampur. Neither name appears in the genealogies of the Nawabs of Rampur and they presumably come from another less notable branch of the Barech Rohillas. There is no connection with the more famous Ahmad Bakhsh Khan who had helped the British against the Marathas in the 1803-05 war and who was apparently descended from a Bokharan family. He was rewarded with the grant of land in Loharu and Firozepur near Delhi so that he became the Nawab of Firozepur or Loharu (see Archer 1992, no. 133 for his portrait).

Our young man may possibly be one of those referred to by the Governor-General Lord Moira, afterwards Marquess of Hastings, in his journal on his tour from Calcutta to the Punjab and back in 1814-15 when he took the artist Sita Ram with him to record the places en route. The party reached Bareilly, the centre of the Rohilla Afghan territory of Rohilkhand, on 24 November 1814: “At Bareilly I received Ahmud Ali Khan, Nawab of Rampore”, accompanied by his uncle and kinsmen. “On the following day I received a set, who appeared to me not to have been desirous of mixing with the others. They were the sons of Hafiz Ruhmut Khan ...,

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A Racehorse with its GroomCalcutta, studio of Shaikh Muhammad Amir, c. 1840Watercolour and bodycolour on paper37 x 48.6 cm

The horse stands facing right being held by his syce or groom with railings behind and a box, possibly a starting box at a racecourse. Behind the landscape dissolves into a series of gentle wooded hills. The painting is in the style of an artist who normally signs himself Shaikh Muhammad Amir Artist Resident of Karaya. This is a suburb south of Calcutta towards Ballygunge, from where he toured British Calcutta seeking commissions. He is the most prolific and talented of the various artists in Calcutta at this period. His known work spans the 1830s and 1840s, beginning in about 1828-30 with his only known major topographical view, one of the Calcutta Esplanade taken from the Maidan (Losty 1990, pl. 24). His only datable work after that is the now dispersed Holroyd Album that was given to the Oriental Club in London in 1839 by Thomas Holroyd. The rest of his known oeuvre consists of paintings of the houses, servants, vehicles, animals or anything else that the British inhabitants of the city required for an album of such things as a memento of their time in the capital of British India. Five of the paintings from the Holroyd Album are in the India Office collections in the British Library (Archer 1972, pp. 91-94, col. Pl. B and figs. 28-30) and in the V & A (Archer 1992, pp. 94-97, nos. 80-81). For other paintings from it and other examples of his work see Welch 1978, nos. 20-24; Hobhouse 2001, nos. 22-25, Galloway 2005, no. 15 and Losty, 2007, no 42.

Normally with this artist’s views of horses or carriages on the Calcutta Maidan, or of the racecourse at the southern end of it, the land recedes as flatly in his paintings as it does in reality, with no suggestion of dimpled hills as here. There are however exceptions as in the signed painting of the racehorse

from the Holroyd Album formerly in the Archer collection (Galloway 2005, no. 15) where the landscape appears to rise slightly and gently. In our painting there are significant stylistic differences to Shaikh Muhammad’s signed work, whose heavy stippling of human flesh is absent here. The costume of the groom is also slightly different from what one would expect with its dangling cummerbund and also a chowrie in his hand, suggesting that the horse might belong to an Indian magnate resident in the city who required the traditional panoply of chowrie and fan when he appeared in public.

ProvenanceNiall Hobhouse

LiteratureArcher, M., Company Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1972Archer, M., Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992Galloway, F., Indian Miniatures from the Archer and Other Private Collections, Francesca Galloway, London, 2005Hobhouse Ltd., Indian Painting for the British 1780-1880, Hobhouse Ltd, London, 2001Losty, J.P., Calcutta City of Palaces, British Library, London, 1990Losty, J.P., Sringar – An Exhibition Celebrating Divine and Erotic Love, Francesca Galloway, 2007Welch, S.C., Room for Wonder: Indian painting during the British Period, American Federation of Arts, New York, 1978

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A Sea Fortress being BesiegedJaipur, late 18th centuryInscribed above in Gurmukhi script Kailasa …[damaged] and in the sky in English Fort of Madras.Opaque watercolour on paperFolio: 30.5 x 46 cm; painting: 26 x 41.5 cm

A towering fortress rises out of the sea being attacked by a host of galleys and other small boats all apparently manned by European soldiers. The fortress is built round a rock rising upwards in three heavily fortified stages with a Jaipur-style palace building at the summit. Around the rock is the town again heavily fortified by its walls, towers and barbicans rising straight from the sea.

Madras of course is completely flat and bears no resemblance to this type of fortress which is instead based on earlier Indian representations of fortresses such as Daulatabad in the Padshahnama in Windsor Castle (Beach, Koch and Thackston 1997, pl. 31) or else Golconda which was represented similarly in Deccani paintings such as in the royal procession to Golconda in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Topsfield 2008, no. 63). Golconda has one towering minaret in that representation, Daulatabad has two in the Padshahnama, so our painter has perhaps combined the two to give his fortress no less than three.

Such representations depend ultimately on European landscape-maps of the seventeenth century as Koch has pointed out (Beach, Koch and Thackston 1997, p. 189). Also dependent on European examples in our painting is the handling of the perspective of the boats and the sea as it heads for the horizon. A very similar but smaller painting depicting a European attack on an Indian type of fortress is in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin (Leach 1995, 7.86, col. Pl. 101). As here both attackers and defenders are European. Like similar drawings with exaggerated European architectural perspectives (ibid., 7.87, 88), they may be attributed to Jaipur in the later eighteenth century, a consequence of the interest with which Sawai Jai Singh II took in European plans and prints when building his new city of Jaipur in 1728.

The Gurmukhi script above indicates that the painting was at some time in Sikh possession or that it entered a Punjabi collection. The inscription seems to be comparing the fortress to Mount Kailasa, the mountain home of the god Siva.

LiteratureBeach, M. C., Koch, E., and Thackston, W., King of the World, the Padshahnama, Azimuth, London, 1997Leach, L.Y., Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995Topsfield, A., Paintings from Mughal India, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2008

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Wedgwood Style Jasper-ware Hookah Base for the Indian MarketEngland, Staffordshire, about 1790-1800White jasper with blue dip and applied moulded reliefs in whiteHeight: 22.8; diameter: 23 cm

Wedgwood was the first firm to develop jasper stoneware in the late 18th century. Jasper was a dense white stoneware stained in a wide choice of colours. It was invented by Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) in the 1770s and took him over 5000 experiments, lasting several years, to perfect his method which he then used it to produce a large variety of vessels as well as plaques and even jewellery. Some English firms specialised in glass and ceramic hookahs combining Indian shapes with European decoration. They were sent to India for the British and Indian smokers. In the 18th century, many Englishmen went native, taking on the lifestyle and customs of the Indian gentleman, dressing in the Indian fashion and smoking the hookah (waterpipe).

LiteratureReilly, R., Wedgwood, Macmillan, London,1989

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The Destruction of Ravana from a Ram-lila PerformancePunjab, c. 1850Opaque watercolour, gouache and gold on paper57.8 x 40.6 cm

The story of Rama as told in the Hindi version by Tulsidas is acted out in the Ram-lila (‘Rama-play’) among local communities everywhere in northern India during the great Dassehra festival in October that celebrates the victory of good over evil, of Rama’s conquest of Ravana. This painting shows the Ram-lila taking place outside the walls of a fortified town somewhere in the Punjab with Rama and Laksmana mounted on two men’s shoulders shooting arrows at a gigantic Ravana, while two men are setting fire to the effigy. Children nearby already hold four of his severed heads. Men dressed as monkeys and bears are off on the left acting as spectators rather than participants in the fighting while other men dressed as demons mill about aimlessly. Musicians accompany the principals chanting the verses of the Tulsi Ramayana.

The climax of the festival commemorates the anniversary of the actual day when Rama finally slew Ravana in order to recover his abducted wife Sita, when the giant construction of Ravana (and normally of the other demons too) is consumed by the flames. The crowd is meant to be brought into the action as if they were the citizens of Ayodhya or of Lanka, not as spectators but active participants. Five boys are chosen to act as the svarups or representations of the four brothers and Sita and they are venerated throughout the entire period of rehearsal and performance.

Painting in the Punjab up to the middle of the nineteenth century was largely the domain of artists from the Punjab Hill states lured by the prospect of patronage to the great cities of Lahore and Amritsar (Archer 1966). Simple portraits or decorative pictures for their Sikh patrons changed possibly under the influence of British taste after the annexation of the Punjab in 1849 into more genre-orientated pictures, slices of real life apparently painted by Sikh artists. These are naturalistic and highly decorative as in the painting of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the Bazaar in the Hodgkin collection (Tospfield 2012, no. 77). With its multitude of people our painting of the Ramlila recalls that of Bhai Singh and his adoring multitudes in the late S C Welch’s collection (Welch 1978, no. 56) as well as Dost Muhammad being entertained in Lahore in the Kapany Collection (Stronge 2002, fig. 189)Changing tastes brightened the colours in favour of aniline dyes such as the vivid green used here.

Such paintings are extremely lively and provide wonderful glimpses into Indian life as lived outside the court. The play is being performed in the grounds outside a city gate somewhere in the Punjab in front of a large circle of spectators mostly Sikh, including some Akalis with their tall conical turbans. The local British Collector and his wife and a group of army officers are closely involved in the action. Around the audience many other activities are taking place. At the front left some spectators are running from a galloping horseman who is clearing the way for an important personage arriving

on an elephant. In the centre a great man is being carried in a palanquin smoking his hookah the while, along with two different carriage loads of his womenfolk and his led riding horse. Another great man is arriving in a howdah on his elephant in the lower right. Further back other spectators watch from the backs of their elephants, camels or horses or stand up on their carts. Around them all street life goes on with knife-grinders and sellers of sweets plying their trades.

In the distance a small mosque has a few Muslim saying their prayers while beyond loom the foothills of the Himalayas

ProvevancePrivate collection, USA

LiteratureArcher, W.G., Painting of the Sikhs, HMSO, London, 1966

Losty, J.P., Indian Miniatures from the James Ivory Collection, Francesca Galloway, London, 2010Stronge, S., ed., The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms, V & A, London, 1999Topsfield, A., Visions of Mughal India: the Collection of Howard Hodgkin, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2012Welch, S.C., Room for Wonder: Indian painting during the British Period, American Federation of Arts, New York, 1978

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Francesca Galloway31 Dover Street London W1S 4NDTel: 0044 (0)207 499 6844Fax: 0044 (0)207 491 1684www.francescagalloway.com

All text by J.P. Losty except for cats: 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 20, 28, 29, 30, 42

All rights reserved

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution to this catalogue:

Misha Anikst Cathy BenkhaimGino FranchiNiall HobhouseWill KwiatkowskiRahul Jain Jerry LostyHelen LovedayMatt PiaPrudence Cuming AssociatesChristine RamphalLucia Savi Robert Skelton