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Lot Essay
Three similar paintings showing Europeans, but within an Indian rather than a European context are in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Leach attributes them to late 18th century Jaipur, based on that city's known European contacts. Linda Leach comments:
"These three Beatty paintings constitute a whimsical, highly amusing, but not altogether flattering view of the late eighteenth century British presence in North India through Indian eyes.... European prints of cities like Paris or Venice reached India and impressed artists who borrowed the genre of leisurely city-dwellers promenading, boating, and so on, against a background of elegant buildings. The perspectives along spectacular vistas in these prints also moved Indian artists who often exaggerated receding diagonals in their work as here." (L.Y.Leach, Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995, Vol.II, pp. 752-755.
"These three Beatty paintings constitute a whimsical, highly amusing, but not altogether flattering view of the late eighteenth century British presence in North India through Indian eyes.... European prints of cities like Paris or Venice reached India and impressed artists who borrowed the genre of leisurely city-dwellers promenading, boating, and so on, against a background of elegant buildings. The perspectives along spectacular vistas in these prints also moved Indian artists who often exaggerated receding diagonals in their work as here." (L.Y.Leach, Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995, Vol.II, pp. 752-755.