Oliver White
Head of Department
Lot 274*
Maharajah Ram Singh II of Jaipur (reg. 1835-80) with courtiers and attendants and the British Resident Jaipur, circa 1870
8 April 2014, 10:30 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £8,125 inc. premium
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Maharajah Ram Singh II of Jaipur (reg. 1835-80) with courtiers and attendants and the British Resident
Jaipur, circa 1870
Jaipur, circa 1870
gouache and gold on paper, yellow and silver inner borders, red outer border
242 x 302 mm.
242 x 302 mm.
Footnotes
Provenance:
Sotheby's, Important Indian Miniatures from the Paul F. Walter Collection, New York, 14th November 2002, lot 57.
This painting seems to express the role of eminence grise which the East India Company, and then the Government of India, played in the life of Maharajah Ram Singh II and of Jaipur. Both his grandfather and father before him had been regarded by the British as 'dissolute' and the state was mired in 'corruption and misgovernment'. Troops had to take control in 1834, though not before Maharajah Jai Singh III (Ram Singh's father) and a British official had been killed in the course of the internecine intrigues. Under British control Ram Singh was brought to heel (from a British point of view) and by 1876 the official view noted his 'inclinations to like Europeans and their ways'.
For a portrait of Ram Singh as a devotee of Siva, and a note on his life with references, see S. C. Welch, Room for Wonder: Indian Painting during the British Period 1760-1880, New York 1978, p. 144, no. 64.; also illustrated in A. Jackson, A. Jaffer (edd.), Maharajah: the splendour of India's Royal Courts, London 2009, p. 97, no. 79 (the painting now in the Harvard Art Museum).