A portrait of a British officer, probably of the Bengal Army, by the artist Raja Jivan Ram

North India, probably Delhi or Meerut, dated 20th July 1824

Footnotes

Provenance
Portion of a catalogue entry affixed to stretcher, probably Sotheby's, circa 1970s (lot 103).
Private UK collection.

The inscription on the reverse reads: 'The work of Jivan Ram son of [...] on the twentieth of the month of July, the year 1824'.

Raja Jivan Ram, who flourished between the 1820s and the 1840s, was greatly used by the British in India for their portraits, done in a European-style naturalistic manner in oil, and also in gouache on ivory. This painting seems to be one of the earliest known of his oeuvre: he had a busy period in 1827, painting a number of officers, but he was to be found later painting members of the entourage of the Begum Samru in the 1830s (some of these are now in the Bodleian Library, and in the former Government House, Allahabad, dated 1835). In 1831-32 he was attached to the staff of Lord William Bentinck, and visited the Sikhs, painting a portrait of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Emily Eden came across him in 1838 at Meerut, where he sketched her brother, the Governor-General, Lord Auckland. Colonel William Sleeman, in his Rambles and Recollections of and Indian Official (1844), recorded that Jivan Ram ('an excellent portrait-painter, and a very honest and agreeable person') had painted the portrait of the Mughal Emperor Akbar II (who reigned until 1837) - although his naturalism was apparently not to the taste of the Emperor's wives, who asked for the shadow under the nose to be removed. The 'Raja' was an honorary title bestowed by the Emperor.

Typical of the artist's oils is the dark background, the strong side-lighting, and the use of vermilion for the lips, and red on the cheeks - as seen too in the portrait of Captain Mcmullin (Pasricha, below). Losty traces these features back to Chinnery.

It has not been possible to decipher the name of the artist's father in the inscription on the back of the canvas: but in an inscription on a painting dated 1824 (now in a Maryland private collection) he noted that he was a resident of Delhi and was the son of La'lji, apparently the Patna and Delhi artist, a pioneer in European naturalistic style. In another 1824 miniature (see Forge and Lynch 2012, below) he described himself as the son of Bafalji, or Baqalji. Losty observes that William Fraser remarked in 1815 that La'lji was a pupil of Johann Zoffany, which is perhaps the root of the European manner which made its way to Jivan Ram's work.

For other examples of his work see J. P. Losty, Of Far Off Lands and People: Paintings from India 1873-1881, Indar Pasricha Fine Arts, London 1993, for an oil on canvas, dated 1827, depicting Captain Robert McMullin at Meerut; Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch, Indian Painting 1600-1870, New York 2012, pp. 52-53, no. 24, for a small portrait of a Company officer by Jivan Ram on ivory, dated Agra, February 1824; and their Indian Court Painting, New York 2017, no. 31, for an oil on canvas dated 1827, depicting an officer of the Bengal Horse Artillery.