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Lot Essay
This elegant panel was probably made for a princely or royal tent. The lavish decoration of these tents would reflect the royal wealth and the majesty of the king’s presence. They were favoured by Mughal rulers who saw these as part of their Central Asian heritage. In Abu al-Fazl’s chronicle of Akbar’s reign, he notes that they are ‘an excellent dwelling place, a shelter from heat and cold […] as the ornament of royalty’. Much later, François Bernier noted that in 1664 the royal enclosure of Aurangzeb’s camp was surrounded by tent walls seven or eight feet high. He wrote, ‘these kanates are of strong cloth which was lined with chittes [chintz] or cloths painted with portals with a great vase of flowers’. He records that the emperor’s private quarters were enclosed with smaller flowered qanats and that ‘beautiful chittes of painted flowers’ lined the interiors (quote in Joseph M. Dye III, The Arts of India, Virginia, 2001, p.467). The spectacular display of a tent that once belonged to Tipu Sultan, probably made in Burhanpur, Deccan, circa 1725-50 and recently reconstructed for The Fabric of India exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, gave an impressive illustration of what these tents would have looked like (Rosemary Crill (ed.), The Fabric of India, exhibition catalogue, London, 2015, cat. 131, pp.124-126). A Mughal Deccani tent canopy recently sold at Christie’s, London, 26 May 2016, lot 14.
Closely related Mughal hangings are in the Calico Museum, Ahmedabad see J. Irwin and M. Hall, Indian Painted and Printed Fabrics. Historic Textiles of India at the Calico Museum, Ahmedabad, 1971, nos.21 and 22, pp.30 and 33, pl.11. These are both dated to the 18th century. Another is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Dye, op.cit, 2001, no.224, p.467).
Closely related Mughal hangings are in the Calico Museum, Ahmedabad see J. Irwin and M. Hall, Indian Painted and Printed Fabrics. Historic Textiles of India at the Calico Museum, Ahmedabad, 1971, nos.21 and 22, pp.30 and 33, pl.11. These are both dated to the 18th century. Another is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Dye, op.cit, 2001, no.224, p.467).