Enrica Medugno
Senior Sale Coordinator
Property from a private collection of Islamic and Indian Art
Lot 165
A female toddy-maker South India, Malabar Coast, circa 1837-40
23 May 2023, 11:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £1,152 inc. premium
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Oliver White
Head of Department
A female toddy-maker
South India, Malabar Coast, circa 1837-40
South India, Malabar Coast, circa 1837-40
watercolour on European paper
125 x 192 mm.
125 x 192 mm.
Footnotes
Provenance
From the Crening Album (formed 1842).
With Eyre & Hobhouse, London SW1, circa 1970s-80s (label on backboard).
Private UK collection until 2003.
Bonhams, Islamic and Indian Art, 16th October 2003, lot 46.
Private UK collection.
For a discussion of this relatively unusual Malabar type, with its distinctive palette, and mostly depicting tradespeople, see M. Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library, London 1972, pp. 55-58; ibid., Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, London 1992, pp. 66-69; J. P. Losty, Indian Life and People in the 19th Century: Company Paintings in the Tapi Collection, New Delhi 2019, pp. 182-184.
For a painting depicting what appears to be the very same woman (in both instances wearing Saiva marks on her forehead, this time preparing coir - string from coconut fibres - with her husband, and also from the Crening Album, and subsequently with Hartnoll & Eyre, London, in the 1960s), see Francesca Galloway, Indian Miniatures from the James Ivory Collection, London 2010, pp. 178-179, no. 87. For another Malabar painting from the album, depicting two hunters, see Christie's, Important Islamic, Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art, 24th April 1990, lot 109.
The gallery label gives a date of circa 1837, presumably based on the watermarks on other paintings in the original album, put together by a certain Stephen Crening in 1842 (BL Add. Or. 5728-5775; see Losty, op. cit., p. 182).