SIGNED SHAYKH ZAYN AL-DIN (FL. 1777-1782), CALCUTTA, INDIA, DATED 1777

Since their rediscovery in the 1950s, the paintings of the Impey Album have come to be acknowledged as the gold standard of Company School natural history painting. Painted by Indian artists on watermarked English paper, with bilingual notes in the bottom corner, they attest to the cosmopolitan environment which prevailed in Calcutta in the final quarter of the 18th century, as well as the personal relationships upon which that was based. At their heart, the paintings are an illustration of the collaboration between the patron, Lady Mary Impey, and a group of three artists: Zayn al-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das. Lady Impey, née Mary Reade, came to India in 1773 with her husband Elijah, who had just been made Lord Justice of Calcutta. She was equally fascinated by India’s nature and its culture. She purchased a series of Ragamala paintings, and began filling the garden of her large home in Calcutta with a menagerie of animals and birds. It may have been the botanist Dr. James Kerr who first suggested to Lady Impey that she find a local artist to paint some of her animals, a project which would occupy her from 1777 until her departure from India in 1783. By this time around 200 paintings had been completed, of which approximately 120 are known today.

The influences which Lady Impey and her artists drew on were diverse. This was the golden age of natural history illustration. George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, which was published in 36 volumes throughout the late 18th century, was referenced in a note on one of the paintings. The artists, however, also drew on a much longer-established indigenous tradition of natural history painting. Andrew Topsfield refers to Zayn al-Din as the ‘Mansur of the Age’, a reference to the 17th century artist whose depictions of Indian birds, animals, and plants had earned him the sobriquet ‘Nadir al-Asr’, the Wonder of the Era (Andrew Topsfield, 'The natural history paintings of Shaikh Zain al-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das', in William Dalrymple (eds.), Forgotten Masters: Indian Paintings for the East India Company, London, 2019, p.40). A native of Patna, Zayn al-Din would have been trained in the ‘Provincial Mughal’ style and been familiar with artists like Mansur.

This painting is unusual among the series. Firstly, as Toby and Gael Falk noted in their cataloguing of the 1984 Colnaghi sale in which this painting appeared, this is 'one of very few of the Impey studies which shows pentimento'. At some point Zayn al-Din decided to paint the bird with talons extended rather than them curled up beneath. The curled-up position suggests that the painting was originally intended to have the bird on a branch but that this was changed to show the bird on the floor. This is truer to the habits of the Tragopan - foragers by nature, the Tragopan mainly resides in the dense undergrowth of the Himalayan foothills. The other unusual feature of this painting is the inclusion of a miniaturised landscape, rather than simply showing it against a plain background. Another Zayn al-Din painting to include this feature include his depiction of a Malabar Giant Squirrel climbing an almond tree sapling (William Dalrymple, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, London, 2019, p.53, no.15). Others include the painting of a Pied Hornbill in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (acc.no.LI901.7) and a depiction of a Grey Heron in a private collection. Other depictions of the Satyr Tragopan from the Impey Album include one by Ram Das which sold in these Rooms, 10 June 2015, and another by Zayn al-Din sold Sotheby's London, 12 October 2005, lot 41.

The Satyr Tragopan seems to have been first described by the ornithologist George Edwards in his 1750 History of Uncommon Birds. He based his description on a preserved specimen of a head together with a drawing which had been sent to his colleague from Bengal, along with a number of other drawings. Given the difficulty transporting specimens of birds - living or otherwise - naturalists in Europe remained dependent on drawings well into the 19th century. Since many of the birds depicted were previously unknown to European scientists, a premium was placed on the skilled observation of biological detail which artists like Zayn al-Din could provide.