A group of Company School terracotta and wood Figurines depicting Trades People and a Village Hut India, 19th Century (26)
461
A group of Company School terracotta and wood Figurines depicting Trades People and a Village Hut
India, 19th Century
carved and decorated in polychrome, the figures clothed and accessorised, depicting fishermen, farmers, water-carriers, huntsmen, tradesmen, guardsmen and civilians; and a wood hut with thatched roof with two figures seated on the porch
the figures 26 cm. high max.; the hut 28.5 cm. high(26)
Sold for £10,200 inc. premium

Footnotes

  • Highly naturalistic sculptures of this type were made at Krishnagar, a village near Calcutta, as well as at Hatwa, Datan (near Saran), Muzaffar-pur, Dacca, Burdwan, and later, Lucknow and Poona. Like Company School paintings, these highly naturalistic sculptures prefigure photography and were made as souvenirs for Western patrons as early as the 1820s. Their inspiration seems to have been 18th and 19th Century Neopolitan creche figures. For a village market scene with figures now in the Peabody Museum of Salem, see Stuart Cary Welch, India: Art and Culture 1300-1900, New York 1985, pp. 91-2, fig. 45).

    Other similar groups of figures in varying sizes have been sold through these rooms in recent years (Bonhams, Islamic and Indian Art, 5 July 2006, lot 302; 28th April 2005, lot 594 and 16th October 2003, lot 353).

Category: Islamic and Oriental Art / Islamic and Indian Art

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