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Lot Essay
This magnificent group portrait of Eight Horse Merchants is amongst the most iconic and unforgettable of the paintings of the Fraser Album. Richly coloured and rendered with extraordinary psychological acuity and immediacy, it is a masterful example of portraiture at its finest.
William Fraser and his friend Colonel James Skinner owned a business importing horses from Afghanistan to India. Afghanistan’s climate was much better suited for breeding strong horses than the heat of India. During a journey with Mountstuart Elphinstone’s first British Embassy to Afghanistan in 1809, William Fraser recognized the commercial potential of this horse trade. Several paintings in the Fraser Album portray "horsebreeders and merchants with their long beards, hawk-like noses, mountainous turbans, quilted coats and Kashmir shawls" (Dalrymple 2019, p.168).
Like almost all of the paintings of the Fraser album, most of the figures in this portrait are depicted frontally, their faces looking intently at the artist and providing a sense of immediacy that is intensely engaging. The artist on this occasion also depicts one of the figures in profile and others in three-quarter profile - one wonders, has he arranged them deliberately this way, or is this the way that his sitters have naturally gravitated? There is neither inhibition on these faces nor any self-consciousness, although the individuals will almost certainly never have had their likeness taken before. Their gazes are so intense that as the observer, you almost feel the need to break the stare.
The horse merchants in our painting are Afghan. All are depicted in flowing robes and intricately tied turbans. A number of them wear embroidered Kashmir shawls tied around their waists or necks. The two specifically described as ‘rich merchants’ in William Fraser’s identifications are picked out in particularly elegant and colourful robes, one of gold-trimmed green cloth and the other a rich checked material. There is real individualism in the faces and the skill with which the portraits are realised is such that without reading the inscriptions one immediately recognises a father and son pair, Timoor Khan and his son Nadir Khan – their distinctive profiles with long thin faces and hooked noses immediately reveal a familial link.
One of the most recent books in which our painting has been published was The Tale of the Horse, A History of India on Horseback by Yashaswini Chandra (2021). The painting’s publication in a book on the history of India demonstrates the lasting legacy of the paintings of the Fraser Album. The success of the Fraser artists in so meticulously recording and documenting their subjects, means that these paintings remain to this day relevant documents in the study of Delhi and the surrounding areas in the early 19th century.
William Fraser and his friend Colonel James Skinner owned a business importing horses from Afghanistan to India. Afghanistan’s climate was much better suited for breeding strong horses than the heat of India. During a journey with Mountstuart Elphinstone’s first British Embassy to Afghanistan in 1809, William Fraser recognized the commercial potential of this horse trade. Several paintings in the Fraser Album portray "horsebreeders and merchants with their long beards, hawk-like noses, mountainous turbans, quilted coats and Kashmir shawls" (Dalrymple 2019, p.168).
Like almost all of the paintings of the Fraser album, most of the figures in this portrait are depicted frontally, their faces looking intently at the artist and providing a sense of immediacy that is intensely engaging. The artist on this occasion also depicts one of the figures in profile and others in three-quarter profile - one wonders, has he arranged them deliberately this way, or is this the way that his sitters have naturally gravitated? There is neither inhibition on these faces nor any self-consciousness, although the individuals will almost certainly never have had their likeness taken before. Their gazes are so intense that as the observer, you almost feel the need to break the stare.
The horse merchants in our painting are Afghan. All are depicted in flowing robes and intricately tied turbans. A number of them wear embroidered Kashmir shawls tied around their waists or necks. The two specifically described as ‘rich merchants’ in William Fraser’s identifications are picked out in particularly elegant and colourful robes, one of gold-trimmed green cloth and the other a rich checked material. There is real individualism in the faces and the skill with which the portraits are realised is such that without reading the inscriptions one immediately recognises a father and son pair, Timoor Khan and his son Nadir Khan – their distinctive profiles with long thin faces and hooked noses immediately reveal a familial link.
One of the most recent books in which our painting has been published was The Tale of the Horse, A History of India on Horseback by Yashaswini Chandra (2021). The painting’s publication in a book on the history of India demonstrates the lasting legacy of the paintings of the Fraser Album. The success of the Fraser artists in so meticulously recording and documenting their subjects, means that these paintings remain to this day relevant documents in the study of Delhi and the surrounding areas in the early 19th century.