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Lot Essay
The figures in this painting as well as the treatment of the landscape in the background relate to a painting attributed to Muhammad Faqirullah Khan, dated to 1760-70 and painted in Farrukhabad, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (The Art of Courtly Lucknow, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 2011, cat.25, p.73-74. As noted in the catalogue, the paintings from Farrukhabad ‘belong to a relatively small group of works […]. A [..] figural type consisting of rather long-legged figures with faces marked by full cheeks and sharp noses and chins is common to paintings produced there between 1760 and 1770’.
Muhammad Faqirullah Khan is known to have painted many studies of women at leisure and applied ‘a formulaic approach to illustrating women, with perfectly defined hairlines and sharp profiles with aquiline noses’. J.P. Losty and Malini Roy, in their discussion of the painter, develops the description of his style in Farrukhabad: ‘recognizable by the stylized women, slender in form with pointed noses and immaculate hairlines, who are dressed in tight fitted bodices and high-waisted skirts down to their feet. The compositions are dominated by shades of yellow and green together with a high horizon point (J.P.Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India, Art, Culture and Empire, London, 2012, fig.117, pp.175-176).
Another painting in similar style is published in Andrew Topsfield, ed., In The Realm of Golds and Kings, Arts of India, London, 2004, cat.151, pp.342-343.
Muhammad Faqirullah Khan is known to have painted many studies of women at leisure and applied ‘a formulaic approach to illustrating women, with perfectly defined hairlines and sharp profiles with aquiline noses’. J.P. Losty and Malini Roy, in their discussion of the painter, develops the description of his style in Farrukhabad: ‘recognizable by the stylized women, slender in form with pointed noses and immaculate hairlines, who are dressed in tight fitted bodices and high-waisted skirts down to their feet. The compositions are dominated by shades of yellow and green together with a high horizon point (J.P.Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India, Art, Culture and Empire, London, 2012, fig.117, pp.175-176).
Another painting in similar style is published in Andrew Topsfield, ed., In The Realm of Golds and Kings, Arts of India, London, 2004, cat.151, pp.342-343.