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Lot Essay
The Wantage Album in the Victoria & Albert Museum comprises thirty-three folios bought in London in 1867-68 by Baron Overstone, who presented them to his daughter Harriet Lindsay, later Lady Wantage, on the occasion of her 31st birthday. She bequeathed them to the V&A in 1921. Moti Chandra, in 1949, concluded that only fourteen folios were 17th century Mughal miniatures, drawn from the same large pool of Imperial folios from which the Minto and Kevorkian folios came. A study produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Kevorkian Album in 1987 and a similar undertaking at the Chester Beatty agreed that a larger number of albums had provided the folios for the later Minto, Kevorkian and Wantage assemblages (Elaine Wright, Muraqqa'. Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Virginia, 2008, p.472).
The remaining nineteen folios were thought to be copies of 17th century works, probably produced in India circa 1800 (Wright, op.cit., p.85). The present charming portrait of a blackbuck, with a likely apocryphal signature of the lauded painter of animals Mansur, is most probably one of this second group of folios, produced for the Wantage album around 1800. It is particularly close to a painting from the same album signed by Manohar in the V&A (acc. no. IM.134-1921), which may have served as its inspiration.
A painting of a blackbuck by Mansur survives in the Kevorkian Album in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Stuart Cary Welch, Annemarie Schimmel, Marie L. Sweietochowski and Wheeler M. Thackston, The Emperors' Album: Images of Mughal India, New York, 1987, no. 50, pp. 184-5). A favoured subject for painters, blackbucks were hunted by Emperor Jahangir using captive 'decoy' blackbuck to draw out wild ones, and he was so enamoured with a decoy named Hansraj that he built a stone sculpture in its form after it had died (Wheeler Thackston, The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, Washington D.C., 1999, p. 69.
Other folios from the Wantage Album were sold in these Rooms, 10 April 2014, lot 30 and 20 October 2016, lot 85.