Enrica Medugno
Senior Sale Coordinator
Lot 223
The Taj Mahal viewed from the south-west Company School, Agra, circa 1810-20
22 May 2025, 11:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£25,000 - £35,000
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Oliver White
Head of Department
The Taj Mahal viewed from the south-west
Company School, Agra, circa 1810-20
Company School, Agra, circa 1810-20
watercolour on paper, black margin rules
520 x 750 mm.
520 x 750 mm.
Footnotes
Provenance
With Hobhouse Ltd., St. James's, London, 1980s.
Private collection, London.
This picture presents the Taj Mahal from the south-west corner terrace, providing a view across the front of the mausoleum towards the south-east corner tower, in double-point perspective. For another work with this viewpoint see Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch, India and Iran: Works on Paper, New York 2022, no. 19.
This view may be the only draughtsman's view of the Taj Mahal for which there is a possible European prototype, by the artist and indigo planter Thomas Longcroft, whose only surviving coloured drawing describes the mausoleum from the same south-west approach (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, see E. Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal, London 2006, fig. 357). Longcroft arrived in India with his friend Johan Zoffany in 1783 and drew some of the Mughal monuments of Delhi and Agra in the 1780s and 1790s in meticulous detail, normally finished in wash. For a similar Agra draughtsman's view, see M. Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library, London 1972, pl. 62 (now British Library inv.no.Add.Or.922).