Guier, Punjab Hills, c.1750
Gouache on paper; 20.8 x 29.8 cm
Ashmolean Museum (1978.2595, Gift of Gerald ReitJinger)
While Mughal period painting gives an exhaustive picture of the life of the nobility, scenes of everyday life in the teeming bazaars appear only occasionally, and then usually as background to some royal cavalcade. A slice of life such as this is all the more uncommon. Armed officers have caught two thieves or felons, one of whom suffers a humiliating public beating over the head with slippers. The other, his turban askew after a similar beating, is led away with a slipper held to his head. A crowd has naturally stopped to stare, the women peering from behind their veils. Elsewhere, life goes on as usual: a young couple buy cutlery or trinkets from a display spread on a cloth, and boys dance to shehnai and drum music. On the right, two boys deliberate in front of a sweetsellers shop. In the foreground, heedless of these distractions, a pink-robed Kanphata yogi meditates at a lingam shrine to the god Shiva. This damaged but lively and intriguing picture shows elements of the style of Nainsukh, the most gifted member of a widely influential family of artists working at Guier and other Punjab Hill courts.
An illustration to the Sat Sai of Biharilal
Kangra, Punjab Hills, c.1785
Gouache with gold on paper; 19 x 13.3 ern
Ashmolean Museum (Mrs M.Barrett Loan)
Krishna at a high window and a lady on a harem balcony exchange a rapt and lingering gaze. Below them, two women look on wonderingly. Beyond is an idyllic landscape. With delicate contrivance, the diagonals of the balcony and wall converge on Krishna, who rests his arms on the sill like a Raja displaying himself formally at his palace window.
This painting belongs to a famous series of illustrations to the Sat Sai of Biharilal. which may have been made for Maharaja Sansar Chand of Kangra. Bihari was court poet to Maharaja Jai Singh of Amber in the seventeenth century. His Sat Sai comprises a notional 'Seven Hundred' Hindi couplets, mainly on the theme of lovers' meetings and secret emotions, in which the narrative conventions or the Radha and Krishna cult are fused with the traditional poetical typology of ideal heroes and heroines. Three verses inscribed on a leaf attached to the picture' are all concerned with the sense of sight or lovers' glances in particular. The most apposite here is the second verse, in which the intense gaze between the lovers is compared to a tightrope, stretched between the roofs of houses, on which their hearts run back and forth like acrobats.
Jaipur, Rajasthan, c.1782-85. By Ramji Das
Gouache with gold and silver on paper; 37.9 x 26.7 cm
Ashmolean Museum (EA 1992.115)
Pratap Singh (r.1778-1803) came to the troubled throne of Jaipur at the age of thirteen. In an age of dissolute princes and scheming courtiers, he is recorded in Ted's history of the Rajputs as 'a gallant prince and not deficient in judgment'. Like other rulers of the time, he could not hold off the invading Marathas and their voracious demands of tribute money. But enough wealth remained at Jaipur for the patronage or art and architecture. Pratap Singh's most impressive addition to the royal palaces was the Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Wind), its high facade a fantastic cluster of screened balconies, where his ladies could enjoy the breeze and watch the street below. He also maintained quite a large painting studio. Ramji Das (fl. c.1755-85) was a senior court artist, a portraitist or conventional but assured skills. Unusually, he produced many informal sketches of the minor officials, artisans, musicians, holy men and others attached to the court. From this official royal portrait little of Pratap Singh's character can be discerned. Crisply refined and typically hard and sombre in style, it represents the final stage in the assimilation of the Mughal equestrian portrait convention at Jaipur. The haloed prince and caparisoned black stallion are outlined against a green ground with a narrow strip of sky, framed by a black border. An inscription records the horse's name as Dhajrao. The numerous royal entourage of earlier periods is reduced to a single attendant with a chowry (fly- whisk). Even this humble individual has almost disappeared behind the horse; but his chowry-bearing hand remains proudly aloft.
Udaipur (Mewar), Rajasthan, c.1805
Gouache with gold on cloth; 107 x 59 cm
Ashmolean Museum (1985.31, Gift of the Friends of the Ashmolean)
Shrewd and amiable but weak-willed, Maharana Bhim Singh ruled ineffectually for fifty years (1778-1828), though he fathered more than a hundred children. In this unconventional, half-lifesize portrait on cloth, he stands barechested and bejewelled, resting his weight nonchalantly on one leg and holding on his forefinger a hawk, also perched on one leg. The Maharana's hairy torso is lovingly delineated, and a splendid flowered gold sash swathes his ample hips. His head is more conventionally shown in raised profile within a radiant nimbus, the latter symbolising his descent from the Sun-god. Combining formal decorum with not quite subversive candour, this portrait can be attributed to Chokha, an individualistic artist whose best work for Bhim Singh (often portraying him enjoying the company of women) dates from the early years of the nineteenth century.
There was already in the Mewar royal collection an extensive and monotonous series of life-sized standing portraits of earlier Maharanas. Bhim Singh often had them brought out to show to James Tod. the British Political Agent, to assist their frequent historical discussions: [Bhim Singh] has a collection of full-lengths of all his royal ancestors, from Samarsi to himself, of their exact heights and with every bodily peculiarity, whether of complexion or form. They are valuable for the costume ... 1
Mostly dating from the late seventeenth century, they were by artists unable to make the transition from miniature work on paper to the grander scale of mural or cloth-painting. But Chokha's portrait of Bhirn Singh is of a different order. The picture has suffered some water damage, with paint loss on the turban in particular. An inscription on the squat, snub-nosed dog gives an old valuation of twenty rupees. A comparable work by Chokha is a cloth-painting of a voluptuous court beauty, in the collection of Sir Howard Hodgkin.
Company school; painted for Lady Impey at
Calcutta, c.1780, by Shaikh Zain ud-Din
Gouache on paper; 94 x 59.5 ern
Ashmolean Museum (Radcliffe Science Library Loan)
By the late eighteenth century many Mughal-trained painters in eastern India were looking for patronage to the emerging British ruling class. The products of this new Company school were of varying quality. The most common type was standardised sets of views of monuments or of native castes, trades and festivals. But in a few cases artists of distinction formed creative relation-
ships with individual patrons. Mary, Lady lmpey. the wife of Sir Elijah, the first Chief Justice at Calcutta, was one such patron. Arriving in India in 1774, the Impeys shared the active scholarly curiosity about its life and culture prevailing among the circle of Warren Hastings at Calcutta.
While Sir Elijah collected Oriental manuscripts and paintings, Lady Impey assembled an aviary and
menagerie of indigenous species. She had these meticulously recorded, where possible in life size, by three Patna artists, of whom Shaikh Zain ud-Din was the most gifted and prolific. Over two hundred such pictures were produced before the Impeys returned to England in 1783.
Paintings of birds, animals and flowers had been an important Mughal genre since the time of Jahangir (1605-27), who was a keen amateur naturalist. Shaikh Zain ud-Din's studies reveal a thorough adaptation of Mughal technique to the conventions of British natural history painting and the larger format of the imported Whatman paper. But in his best works the Indian sensibility remains. It appears here in the elegantly nowing curvature of the standing crane and the arresting
colouring of its head and spindly legs, creating a heightened contrast with the subtle gradations of the finely painted plumage.
