PUNJAB HILLS, POSSIBLY SIKH, CIRCA 1820-30

This frenetic painting captures the crucial moment at the end of a large, organised hunt. After spending many hours gradually driving quarry – here including tigers, leopards, deer, boar and rabbits – into a smaller and smaller area the master of the hunt, in the lower left, finally gives the order for the hunters to fire their weapons. Although the encircled animals seem to have their fates pretty well sealed, a tiger mauling a man in the bottom of the painting shows that it is not an entirely one-way affair.

To find a standalone painting such as this from the Punjab Hills is unusual and even more so for being on the large scale of the present painting. The scene illustrates well the preference for the naturalistic rendition of animated life and nature in Pahari painting from the mid-18^th century onwards. A painting of a Sikh ruler shooting wild boar in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (1998.68), is of similar scale and subject to our painting. However, whilst the San Francisco example is green throughout, our painting appears to show a greater influence of Rajput painting with the very varied blocks of colour suggesting our artist may have trained in Rajasthan.