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Lot Essay
Inscriptions:
On the flyleaf in black nasta'liq: 19, lambar nur dahum (?)
Below in pencil: '4. BUHADOORA ONE OF THE HEAD MEN OF SAWPLUH (?), DISTRICT MAUDOUTHEE (?), WEST OF DEHLEE, 30 MILES'
The so-called ‘Fraser Album’ occupies an important place in the study of Company School painting in general, as it does in the scholarship of Toby Falk. The paintings were discovered among the papers of James and William Fraser in Inverness, and auctioned in two parts by Sotheby’s, the first half in London on the 7 July and the rest in New York on 9 December 1980. Over the next years, Toby and Gael Falk worked with Mildred Archer to examine the letters of the two brothers in search of information which would help elucidate the paintings. In 1989, they jointly published India Revealed: The Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35 (London, 1989). Although Gael's name did not appear on the cover, in Toby's words, her work on the book was such that 'co-authorship would [have been] more appropriate'. The book provided the first overview of the paintings which – in Falk’s own words – ‘surpass all known Company portraits’ for their ‘special intensity, […] unusual skill and accomplishment’ (Toby Falk, 'The Fraser Company Drawings', Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture, 5 May 1988, Royal Society of Arts, London).
James Fraser arrived in Calcutta in January 1814, and travelled with his brother to Nepal on an East India Company Expedition. While working there he began compulsively drawing and painting the landscapes, monuments, and people he encountered. On 4 August 1815, for example, he recorded the following in his diary: ‘this day as yesterday all day drawing, and I have nearly finished my sketch of Gungotree [Gangotri] with the figures’ (Toby Falk and Mildred Archer, India Revealed, London, 1989, p.45). While in Calcutta, he also studied painting with James d'Oyly, another English civil servant with a passion for art. In the brothers' eagerness to record all that they saw, William took the initiative to also hire a local artist ‘to take the likenesses of several of the servants and Ghorkas’. When the brothers returned to Delhi at the end of August, they tasked the artists with painting some of the dancers and singers they met who were attached to the Mughal court. This marked the inception of the five year project which became ‘the Fraser Album’.
The subjects of the portraits continued to change, reflecting the changing role which the brothers played in the Company state. Following his return, William Fraser became assistant to the Resident in Delhi. His main responsibility was to assist in the mapping of landholdings around Delhi, particularly in present-day Haryana state. This entailed meeting personally with the local landowners, chieftains, and headmen to better understand the structure of revenue holdings, with a view to imposing a more effective system of taxation. The nature of these meetings is captured by another composition in the Fraser Album, the Assembly of Village Elders in the collection of Stuart Cary Welch (p.167). Eleven prominent figures in the lives of their villages gather around Fraser’s Munshi, Fuzl Uzeem, and his diwan, Mohan Lal, who carefully records the information given to him by his interlocutors. Socially, these eleven men belong to the same caste as Bahadoorah, the subject of this painting.
In the brother’s correspondence, only one artist – a certain Lallji – is mentioned by name. As for the artist who painted this striking portrait, they remain anonymous. In early nineteenth-century Delhi, the artist who was best known to British residents was undoubtedly Ghulam Ali Khan, who is known to have produced many architectural paintings for British patrons. In the later 1820s, however, he was engaged in producing albums of portraits for the mercenary James Skinner, a close friend of the Fraser brothers, whose recruits were a rich source of subject matter for the Fraser artists. Thus Yuthika Sharma attributes the paintings of the Fraser Album to the ‘circle of Ghulam Ali Khan’. However, although Toby Falk and Mildred Archer’s exhaustive survey of the Fraser archives may have provided us with no names, on the evidence of the portraits alone the ‘Fraser artist’ must be considered among the foremost masters of portraiture in late Mughal India.
In 1819, William recounted in a letter to his father that he had just sent James forty paintings, which he hoped his brother would then send back to their home Scotland. He looked forward to the nostalgia he would feel when ‘some years hence I shall con them at Moniack, with recollections that never can leave my heart’ (Falk and Archer, op. cit., p. 40). The pencilled number ‘4’ on the current lot indicates that this was one of those forty, numbered by William in 1819. On receiving the portraits, James was effusive in his praise. On 30 October 1820, James sent his father a letter saying that ‘the native Drawings of Costume will form unquestionably the finest collection that ever visited England from hence & include all the inhabitants of all the districts near Dihlee’ (Falk and Archer, op. cit., p.40). Unfortunately, William would never see the paintings again, or experience the pleasure of peaceful recollection in Scotland. He died in India at the hands of an assassin in 1835. James, however, doubtless derived hours of enjoyment from them in his later years, the paintings reconnecting him with his lost brother and the time they spent experiencing the dazzling and varied sights of late Mughal India.
In their time studying the life and art of the Fraser brothers, Toby and Gael worked closely with Malcolm and Kathy Fraser, the custodians of the brothers' papers. Their long friendship with Toby and Gael Falk is a model for how the collaboration between private individuals and scholars can greatly enrich our understanding of history, by bringing to light otherwise-unrecorded personal stories and experiences. The recent death of Malcolm Fraser comes as a great sadness, and this lot is dedicated to his memory.