INDIA, CIRCA 1600-1625

This most unusual box is decorated with painting and gilding under lacquer on three faces, the top and both interior faces. Each depicts an enthronement scene with variations, painted in a style very similar indeed to that on a book-cover sold in these Rooms, 23rd October 2007, lot 345 (also published Ludwig V. Habighorst, Moghul Ragamala, Koblenz 2006, fig.19, p.58). That cover had been attached to a Ragamala manuscript which was dateable to 1600-1625. A similarly sized contemporaneous Indian lacquer panel, painted on a gold ground and with less densely filled floral ground, is in Copenhagen (Kjeld von Folsach, Art from the World of Islam in the David Collection, Copenhagen, 2001, no.75, p.102). The very unusual proportions of this box, coupled with the demonstrated links to lacquer bindings, make it very likely that it was made as the presentation box for an important manuscript.
In the note to the bookcover we discussed the origins of this decoration in Safavid bindings of the 16th century (Tim Stanley,"The Rise of the Lacquer Binding", in Jon Thompson and Sheila R. Canby (eds.), The Hunt for Paradise, exhibition catalogue, Milan, 2003, pp.184-201). The composition of a ruler seated under a canopy in a garden surrounded by attendants is found in a number of Iranian examples such as one in the British Library (Stanley,op. cit., pl.7.10, p.195). In the present binding however the figures are completely Indian and the floral designs have become much freer in interpretation than in the Iranian original. The quality of the painting in the present box seems a little higher than that of the binding, and the central figure is closer in facial features to those of the emperor Akbar.