Oliver White
Head of Department
Lot 170
A study of a bird perched on the branch of a flowering plant, by Shaykh Zayn al-Din, from the collection of Lady Impey Company School, Calcutta, dated 1777
11 June 2020, 11:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £40,062.50 inc. premium
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A study of a bird perched on the branch of a flowering plant, by Shaykh Zayn al-Din, from the collection of Lady Impey
Company School, Calcutta, dated 1777
Company School, Calcutta, dated 1777
pen and ink, watercolour with gum arabic, heightened with bodycolour, on watermarked paper, inscribed at lower left Black Kuil [in Persian]/Divdar ka derakht, Giant Pree [?]/In the Collection of Lady Impey in Calcutta/Painted By Zayn al-Din [in Persian] Native of Patna 1777, numbered 39 at upper left
485 x 605 mm.
485 x 605 mm.
Footnotes
Provenance
Acquired by Lady Hogg from an unknown London gallery in 1940-41, which was by repute destroyed by bombs on the day following their purchase.
Lady (Pollie Victoria) Hogg, maternal grandmother of the current owner, until 2003.
Min Hogg, her daughter (1938-2019), founding editor of the magazine World of Interiors from 1981 to 2001.
Thence by descent to her nephew.
Sir Elijah Impey was the East India Company's Chief Justice of Bengal from 1774 to 1782. He was a well-known patron of Indian artists, but his wife, Mary, Lady Impey, who joined him in Calcutta in 1777, was particularly interested in the flora and fauna of the surrounding area, creating her own menagerie. She then commissioned studies of animals and plants from various artists from the nearby city of Patna, though trained in the studios of the Nawabs of Bengal at Murshidabad in the 1750s and 60s. The most senior were the Muslim Shaykh Zayn-al-Din, and the Hindus Ram Das and Bhawani Das. The precision of these artists' technique, which stemmed from the Mughal tradition, appealed to British patrons. The series commissioned by Lady Impey (as well as others in a similar style by unknown artists) are particularly striking because of their large size, using sheets of English watermarked paper. There were 326 works in the original series (of which 197 featured birds, 76 of fish, 28 of reptiles, 17 beasts, and 8 of plants), which were brought back to England with the Impeys in 1783, and were sold at Phillips in London in 1810.