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Portrait of a dignitary holding a rose, page from a muraqqa'…
See original version (French)
117
-
Portrait of a dignitary holding a rose, page from a muraqqa'…
See original version (French)
Estimate €15,000 - €20,000
Voluntary lot
Description
Portrait of a dignitary holding a rose, page from a muraqqa' by Colonel Polier
India, Mughal art, Awadh workshop, circa 1785
Calligraphy signed Mirza Muhammad 'Ali, dated AH 1195 (AD 1780-81)
Opaque pigments heightened with gold on paper, mounted as an album page with wide polychrome margins decorated with bouquets of blue and pink flowers. On the recto, a full-length portrait of a dignitary, depicted in profile in a vast plain; dressed in white, wearing a turban adorned with an aigrette, adorned with necklaces of pearls and a bazuband, girded with a dagger and holding a talwar, he carries a rose in his hand. The identification cartouche at the bottom of the composition has been left blank. Verso, a Persian quatrain calligraphed in nasta'liq in black ink, signed and dated. Number on verso (calligraphy side), in pencil: "617". Number on front, in pencil at top edge of binding: "42".
Page: 39.5 × 28 cm (15.6 × 11 in.); painting: 17.6 × 11.5 cm (6.9 × 4.5 in.)
Inscription (verso) Persian quatrain: "The preacher said, 'A prayer is not accepted From the hand that is soiled by the cup of wine.'" A dervish replied: "As long as you hold a cup of wine in your hands, what is the use of praying to God?" " Mirza Muhammad 'Ali, 1195 (1780-1781).
Provenance
"Collection of the late Dr Robert Douat (1926-2004), collector of Indian paintings - his register mentions an attribution to Mihr Chand.
This painting appears in a photograph by Enrico Isacco (Galerie Marco Polo), now in Getty Images, where it is described as "Portrait of a dignitary, official or person from Siraj ud-Daulah's court, miniature from the Mughal School, 1779, India 18th Century".
Related works
-Folio 24 of the Polier album in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, signed by the same calligrapher Mirza Muhammad 'Ali and dated between 1195 and 1198 AH. (1780-1784).
-Bonhams, London, sale 22 March 2022, lot 311: Polier muraqqa' page including calligraphy by Mirza Muhammad 'Ali and a princely portrait attributed to Mihr Chand.
-British Museum, London (inv. 1920,0917,0.133-153), muraqqa' recently identified by Malini Roy as a Polier album produced in Mihr Chand's workshop in Faizabad.
-Muraqqa' i. 4598 and i. 4599, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin; Indian Drawings 13, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester - comparable in size to the present folio.
-Portrait of Prince Aurangzeb, Mughal India, c. 1650, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 55.121.10.24, Shah Jahan Album) and Portrait of Emperor Aurangzeb, Mughal India, 17th century inv. 45.174.28.
Bibliography
-Malini Roy, 'A Newly Identified Muraqqa' Assembled for Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier in the British Museum', in F. Weis (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Indian Muraqqa'as: Audiences - Artists - Patrons and Collectors, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2024.
-John Seyller, 'Mihr Chand's Copies and Adaptations of Earlier Mughal Paintings', ibid.
-Susan Stronge and Behnaz Atighi-Moghaddam, 'An Unrecorded Polier Muraqqa' (c. 1785): New Insights into British-Hindustani Cultural Interaction', in Adle Nameh: Studies in Memory of Chahriyar Adle, Tehran, 2018, pp. 195-228, in part pp. 195 and 205-207.
This folio belongs to the famous albums (muraqqa') commissioned by Colonel Antoine-Louis Polier (1741-1795), a Swiss-born officer in the service of the English East India Company and then the court of Awadh under the nawabs Shuja-ud-Daula and Asaf-ud-Daula. On his return to Europe in 1788, Polier brought back several major albums, which are now scattered among the British Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and several private collections.
The calligrapher Mirza Muhammad 'Ali, whose hand signs the quatrain and date on the reverse, was active in northern India in the 1780s, when the large albums assembled for Antoine Polier and the Awadh elites were being developed. The contemporary biographer Ghulam Muhammad Haft Qalami Dihlavi (d. 1823), who met him at his home in Lucknow around 1794-1795, devotes a detailed note to him in his Tazkira-yi Khushnavisan (p. 65). His known signed corpus - seven leaves in the V&A's Polier album and a third of the leaves in Polier's Posterior Album given to Sir William Jones (Rylands Persian ms 10) - places the present folio unequivocally within his oeuvre.
The iconographic model. The empty identification cartouche is a frequent feature of Polier folios, so the precise identity of the model remains open. The dignitary is related to portraits of Prince Aurangzeb before his enthronement, such as the one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Shah Jahan Album, inv. 55.121.10.24, c. 1650). The absence of the solar nimbus, an attribute reserved for the reigning sovereign, supports the hypothesis that the painter worked from a portrait of Aurangzeb, who was still a prince at the time. This practice of re-use is well documented in the Awadh workshop of the years 1770-1785, where the painters in Polier's service reproduced or adapted canonical Mughal models for a European clientele eager for dynastic portraits.
The painter. The present painting is anonymous, but was attributed - in the records of its owner - to Mihr Chand (act. c. 1759-1786), son of Ganga Ram, who trained at the court of Shah 'Alam in Delhi in the years 1750-1760 and was then recruited by Polier around 1773 to run his Faizabad studio. The correspondence preserved between Polier and Mihr Chand attests to the central role played by the painter in the design of the albums. Mihr Chand signed only two known paintings in the Polier corpus, the vast majority of works being attributed to him on stylistic grounds (M. Roy, SOAS thesis, 2009; J. Seyller, in Weis 2024). In addition to the official portraits of the Awadh nawabs, his work is also characterised by a practice of skilful reuse and reinterpretation of older models. Seyller has shown that Mihr Chand and his father inaugurated a taste and a market for faithful copies of seventeenth-century Mughal portraits, particularly those of sovereigns (Seyller, in Weis 2024, p. 337).
See original version (French)
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