Matthew Thomas
Senior Specialist
Lot 134
A Company school terracotta oxen and cart with four figures Krishnanagar, Bengal, 19th Century(5)
6 October 2015, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£2,000 - £3,000
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A Company school terracotta oxen and cart with four figures
Krishnanagar, Bengal, 19th Century
Krishnanagar, Bengal, 19th Century
with painted wood and terracotta bases, the wood and bamboo cart with clay wheels, the oxen of painted terracotta, the figures of terracotta with cotton clothes, comprising a potter, a fakir and two servants
the cart 27.5 cm. long(5)
the cart 27.5 cm. long(5)
Footnotes
Highly naturalistic sculptures of this type were made at Krishnanagar, 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).