Enrica Medugno
Senior Sale Coordinator
Lot 219
A maiden standing beneath a flowering tree (perhaps illustrating Sarang ragini), on a page from an album made for William Fraser Mughal, circa 1800
22 May 2025, 11:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £14,720 inc. premium
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Oliver White
Head of Department
A maiden standing beneath a flowering tree (perhaps illustrating Sarang ragini), on a page from an album made for William Fraser
Mughal, circa 1800
Mughal, circa 1800
gouache and gold on paper, inner border with floral motifs in gold on a blue ground, fine floral outer border in colours and gold
painting 132 x 174 mm.; album page 305 x 199 mm.
painting 132 x 174 mm.; album page 305 x 199 mm.
Footnotes
Provenance
William Fraser (1784-1835).
Thence by descent in the Fraser family.
For a pair of paintings, one depicting a semi-naked princess at her toilette, with similar floral borders, dated circa 1780, see Sotheby's New York, Indian and Southeast Asian Works of Art, 20th March 2013, lot 326.
The iconography of this raga, Sarang ragini is rare and is apparently closely associated, perhaps exclusively, with Hyderabad. See K. Ebeling, Ragamala Painting, Basel 1973, pp. 195 and 256. He refers to two examples in the collection of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaja Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly The Prince of Wales Museum), Bombay. See also: a painting of the same subject, Hyderabad, late 17th/18th Century, offered in these rooms, Bonhams, India in Art, 7th June 2022, lot 19; and another, dated to circa 1700, in the collection of Dr Claus Virch, Sotheby's New York, Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Works of Art, 16th March 2016, lot 866.
The particularly Deccani subject seems to derive ultimately from ancient Indian stone sculpture, in which a beautiful young woman embraces a tree, or is enveloped by it (salabhanjika). For an earlier Mughal example, see a page from the Dara Shikoh Album (British Library, Add. Or. 3129; T. Falk, M. Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, London 1981, no. 68, col. pl. 6). Deccani examples in the late 17th and 18th Century become more mannered and openly 'romantic': see M. Zebrowski, Deccani Painting, London 1983, figs. 222 and 232. See also a maiden in a painting formerly in the collection of Eva and Konrad Seitz, dated to circa 1720 (Francesca Galloway, Ivory and Painting: Indian Goods for the Luxury Markets, London 2011, pp. 66-67, no. 22); and Christie's, Arts of India, 26th May 2016, lot 3 (where the maiden smokes a hookah).