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TWO FOLIOS FROM A 'POLIER' ALBUMThe following two lots come from a so-called ‘Polier' Album, named after their patron Antoine-Louis Henri de Polier. Born in Switzerland, he found employment as a surveyor with the East India Company in 1757, the year of the Battle of Plassey which marked the transition of the company from a group of merchant-adventurers to a fully-fledged militarised state. As Chief Engineer of the Bengal army he designed Fort William in Kolkata, a symbol of the arrival of this new player on the subcontinent. He then turned his hand to palace architecture, when he was sent to Awadh to serve as the chief engineer for Nawab Shuja’ al-Dawla, where he would spend the rest of his time in India before his return to Europe in 1787.While in India, Polier made a point of learning Sanskrit, collecting manuscripts, and making a study of the religions he encountered. In 1767 he was given three albums of paintings as a gift, and from there began to collect Indian paintings with enthusiasm. His tastes gravitated towards portraits of the Indian stock figures which inhabited the eighteenth-century Western imagination – courtiers, mendicant holy men, princes – as well as landscapes painted in the Lucknow style, often with calligraphic panels on the reverse, and all framed by distinctive floral margins. His main collaborator in this was Mir Chand, an artist from Lucknow who sourced old paintings, planned the layout of the albums, and contributed a few of his own composition. Another name which frequently recurs is that of Hafiz Nur Allah, a calligrapher whose signature appears on the reverse of lot 113.Polier’s Indian collaborators produced a prodigious number of albums for him, some of which he kept for himself and some of which he gave to friends. The largest group are the ten in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. In the UK there are a number of folios in the British Museum which were purchased by the collector William Beckford, as well as an album entirely devoted to calligraphy which Polier gave to his friend Sir William Jones and which is today in the John Rylands Library in Manchester (Persian MS 10). Folios from a Polier album, so similar in the appearance of their borders and the content of their paintings that they likely came from the same album, were sold in these Rooms 12 June 2018, lots 23 and 24.
A TANBUR PLAYER
AWADH, PROVINCIAL MUGHAL, INDIA, CIRCA 1770
細節
A TANBUR PLAYER
AWADH, PROVINCIAL MUGHAL, INDIA, CIRCA 1770
Opaque pigments heightened with gold on paper, set within a wide pink border, laid onto card with wide floral borders between simple gold floral margins on blue ground, the verso with an unsigned black nasta'liq quatrain within similar margins
Painting 7 ½ x 5in. (19 x 12.5cm.); calligraphy panel 7 ½ x 5in. (19.3 x 12.5cm.); folio 15 ½ x 11 ½in. (39.5 x 29cm.)
AWADH, PROVINCIAL MUGHAL, INDIA, CIRCA 1770
Opaque pigments heightened with gold on paper, set within a wide pink border, laid onto card with wide floral borders between simple gold floral margins on blue ground, the verso with an unsigned black nasta'liq quatrain within similar margins
Painting 7 ½ x 5in. (19 x 12.5cm.); calligraphy panel 7 ½ x 5in. (19.3 x 12.5cm.); folio 15 ½ x 11 ½in. (39.5 x 29cm.)
拍場告示
Please note this lot sold as part of the collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps Bt. (1792-1872) on 27 November 1974 at Sotheby’s New Bond Street (lot 736).
榮譽呈獻
Sara Plumbly
Director, Head of Department