Lot 84
A LATE 18TH CENTURY LUCKNOW SCHOOL PAINTING
PALACE SCENE WITH HIGH WIRE WALKERS
Auction: 8 April 2009 at 11:30 BST
Description
Gouache heightened with gold on card
Dimensions
26cm x 38cm
Footnote
Note:
The painting is a slightly later version of a well known composition that first occurs in the albums compiled in Lucknow for Colonel Antoine Polier, a Swiss adventurer in the service of the East India Company and subsequently in that of the Nawab Vizier of Oudh. Polier had three versions done for him. The prime version of circa1780 is in one of his sumptuous albums, which passed into the collection of William Beckford and then that of the Dukes of Hamilton, and is now in the Museum fur Indische Kunst, Berlin, Album I 5005, f. 14. This is coloured and heavily gilded in the late Mughal manner, as are the two other versions in albums given by Polier to Ozias Humphry in 1784 (now in the British Museum) and Lady Coote (now in the Aschenbach Foundation, San Francisco), published in the Ehrenfeld catalogue [Cat.No.63] Alexandria Virginia 1998. This version dates from about 1790 and shows the influence of British art on the development of the Lucknow school in its more subdued colouring and lack of gilding. All versions show a grasp of single-point perspective rare in Indian painting before the Agra-Delhi school of the early 19th century. The prime version lacks the latticed arch of the three subsequent versions through which the action is seen.