
Mark Rasmussen
International Director
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Sold for US$6,000 inc. premium
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International Director
As the British East India Company expanded its purview in South Asia, Indian painters were commissioned to produce works in European style and palette, known as the Company School. As exemplified by the present lot, paintings of this school employ shading and linear perspective, and are done in watercolors rather than gouache. Here a prosperous nobleman wearing an elaborate yellow turban stands before two supplicants with clasped hands, while his attendant and an indigent woman follow behind him. Each figure's face and hands are rendered with an unerring sense of three-dimensionality.
Compare with a stylistically similar painting of a Family of Tartars, circa 1885, in the Cleveland Museum of Art (acc. no.2011.137); also see Archer, Company Paintings , London, 1992, p.128, no.57.
Provenance
Christie's, London, 28 September 2001, lot 385
Sotheby's, London, 12 November 2013, lot 223