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拍品專文
INSCRIPTIONS:
In the lower left corner, 'mahuka devourer with the mouth, in the collection of Lady Impey in Calcutta, Painted by zayn al-din native of Patna, 1777.
Above, derakht-e Achin 'Plumeria'
Since their rediscovery in the 1950s, the paintings of the Impey Album have come to be acknowledged as the gold standard of Company School natural history painting. Painted by Indian artists on watermarked English paper, with bilingual notes in the bottom corner, they attest to the cosmopolitan environment which prevailed in Calcutta in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, as well as the personal relationships upon which that was based. The role of these paintings in increasing European understanding of India’s wildlife is also attested to by a contemporary mention of this particular painting in John Latham’s Supplement to his General Synopsis of Birds (see below). The Impey Album also was an important interest of Toby Falk’s: in 1984 he and his wife Gael jointly published Birds in an Indian Garden, combining their shared interest in Indian art and the natural world.
At their heart, the paintings are an illustration of the collaboration between the patron, Lady Mary Impey, and a group of three artists: Zayn al-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das. Lady Impey, née Mary Reade, came to India in 1773 with her husband Elijah, who had just been made Lord Justice of Calcutta. She was equally fascinated by India’s nature and its culture. She purchased a series of Ragamala paintings, and began filling the garden of her large home in Calcutta with a menagerie of animals and birds. It may have been the botanist Dr. James Kerr who first suggested to Lady Impey that she ought to find a local artist to paint some of her animals, a project which would occupy her from 1777 until her departure from India in 1783.
The influences which Lady Impey and her artists drew on were diverse. This was the golden age of natural history illustration. George-Louis Leclerc de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, which was published in 36 volumes throughout the late eighteenth century, was referenced in a note on one of the paintings. The artists, however, also drew on a much longer-established indigenous tradition of natural history painting. Andrew Topsfield refers to Zayn al-Din as the ‘Mansur of the Age’, a reference to the seventeenth century artist whose depictions of Indian birds, animals, and plants had earned him the sobriquet ‘Nadir al-Asr’, the Wonder of the Era (Andrew Topsfield, 'The natural history paintings of Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das', in William Dalrymple (eds.), Forgotten Masters: Indian Paintings for the East India Company, London, 2019, p.40). A native of Patna, Zayn al-Din would have been trained in the ‘Provincial Mughal’ style and familiar with artists like Mansur.
Of the three artists involved on the project, Zayn al-Din was the only one involved from its inception: Bhawani Das and Ram Das seem to have been brought on later, perhaps as apprentices. He was extraordinarily prolific, producing around 40 works in 1777 alone. Like the present lot, the majority of these early paintings were of the ‘bird and branch’ genre, which is likely to have been the result of Lady Impey’s own aesthetic tastes. Other examples in the same vein include the painting of a Sulphur-crested cockatoo on a custard apple branch in the Ashmolean Museum (LI901.6), and the Rufous Treepie and Brahminy Starling in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018.53.10 and 2018.53.3). A striking feature of many of these paintings is that the branch is presented with a cross-section of the stem, as though neatly cut from a plant and hanging in space. The tension between verisimilitude and fantasy, perfect stillness and lively animation, reflects the manner in which Zayn al-Din looked to both European and Mughal painting for inspiration.
The bird depicted here is referred to by its Persian name Mahukaha and in English as a ‘Devourer with the Mouth’. In a 1787 supplement to his highly successful A General Synopsis of Birds, the ornithologist John Latham describes a bird which he calls an ‘Egyptian cuckoo’. In his description of the bird, he noted: I observe one greatly similar in the drawings of Lady Impey […] the plumage being black throughout, except the wings, which are of a bright ferruginous flame-colour’. Latham notes that the bird in question was referred to in India as a ‘Crow-pheasant’, though he also noted that its ‘Indian name’ meant ‘Devourer with the Mouth’ (John Latham, Supplement to the General Synopsis of Birds, London, 1787, p.101; cover illustrated here). In the present day, this species is referred to as the Lesser Coucal, Centropus Bengalensis. As its Latin name would suggest, it is found in Eastern India – including Bengal – and across Southeast Asia. It can be distinguished by its black body, slightly hooked beak, and its protruding hind claw, all of which have been carefully depicted by Zayn al-Din.
The branch on which the bird sits can be identified as a Plumeria. This is not a plant native to India, but instead is a native to Central and South America. However, since their branches continue to produce flowers after they have been uprooted, the Plumeria tree is often regarded as a sacred symbol of immortality, referred to as the Champa or Temple Tree. It is also prized for its scent: in the Jahangirnama, the Mughal emperor described it as ‘a flower of increasingly sweet fragrance […] when in flower, one tree will perfume a garden’. The folding edges of the petals are no less carefully observed by Zayn al-Din than the details of the bird, contributing to an overall composition which easily ranks among the finest paintings in this iconic group.
In the lower left corner, 'mahuka devourer with the mouth, in the collection of Lady Impey in Calcutta, Painted by zayn al-din native of Patna, 1777.
Above, derakht-e Achin 'Plumeria'
Since their rediscovery in the 1950s, the paintings of the Impey Album have come to be acknowledged as the gold standard of Company School natural history painting. Painted by Indian artists on watermarked English paper, with bilingual notes in the bottom corner, they attest to the cosmopolitan environment which prevailed in Calcutta in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, as well as the personal relationships upon which that was based. The role of these paintings in increasing European understanding of India’s wildlife is also attested to by a contemporary mention of this particular painting in John Latham’s Supplement to his General Synopsis of Birds (see below). The Impey Album also was an important interest of Toby Falk’s: in 1984 he and his wife Gael jointly published Birds in an Indian Garden, combining their shared interest in Indian art and the natural world.
At their heart, the paintings are an illustration of the collaboration between the patron, Lady Mary Impey, and a group of three artists: Zayn al-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das. Lady Impey, née Mary Reade, came to India in 1773 with her husband Elijah, who had just been made Lord Justice of Calcutta. She was equally fascinated by India’s nature and its culture. She purchased a series of Ragamala paintings, and began filling the garden of her large home in Calcutta with a menagerie of animals and birds. It may have been the botanist Dr. James Kerr who first suggested to Lady Impey that she ought to find a local artist to paint some of her animals, a project which would occupy her from 1777 until her departure from India in 1783.
The influences which Lady Impey and her artists drew on were diverse. This was the golden age of natural history illustration. George-Louis Leclerc de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, which was published in 36 volumes throughout the late eighteenth century, was referenced in a note on one of the paintings. The artists, however, also drew on a much longer-established indigenous tradition of natural history painting. Andrew Topsfield refers to Zayn al-Din as the ‘Mansur of the Age’, a reference to the seventeenth century artist whose depictions of Indian birds, animals, and plants had earned him the sobriquet ‘Nadir al-Asr’, the Wonder of the Era (Andrew Topsfield, 'The natural history paintings of Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das', in William Dalrymple (eds.), Forgotten Masters: Indian Paintings for the East India Company, London, 2019, p.40). A native of Patna, Zayn al-Din would have been trained in the ‘Provincial Mughal’ style and familiar with artists like Mansur.
Of the three artists involved on the project, Zayn al-Din was the only one involved from its inception: Bhawani Das and Ram Das seem to have been brought on later, perhaps as apprentices. He was extraordinarily prolific, producing around 40 works in 1777 alone. Like the present lot, the majority of these early paintings were of the ‘bird and branch’ genre, which is likely to have been the result of Lady Impey’s own aesthetic tastes. Other examples in the same vein include the painting of a Sulphur-crested cockatoo on a custard apple branch in the Ashmolean Museum (LI901.6), and the Rufous Treepie and Brahminy Starling in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018.53.10 and 2018.53.3). A striking feature of many of these paintings is that the branch is presented with a cross-section of the stem, as though neatly cut from a plant and hanging in space. The tension between verisimilitude and fantasy, perfect stillness and lively animation, reflects the manner in which Zayn al-Din looked to both European and Mughal painting for inspiration.
The bird depicted here is referred to by its Persian name Mahukaha and in English as a ‘Devourer with the Mouth’. In a 1787 supplement to his highly successful A General Synopsis of Birds, the ornithologist John Latham describes a bird which he calls an ‘Egyptian cuckoo’. In his description of the bird, he noted: I observe one greatly similar in the drawings of Lady Impey […] the plumage being black throughout, except the wings, which are of a bright ferruginous flame-colour’. Latham notes that the bird in question was referred to in India as a ‘Crow-pheasant’, though he also noted that its ‘Indian name’ meant ‘Devourer with the Mouth’ (John Latham, Supplement to the General Synopsis of Birds, London, 1787, p.101; cover illustrated here). In the present day, this species is referred to as the Lesser Coucal, Centropus Bengalensis. As its Latin name would suggest, it is found in Eastern India – including Bengal – and across Southeast Asia. It can be distinguished by its black body, slightly hooked beak, and its protruding hind claw, all of which have been carefully depicted by Zayn al-Din.
The branch on which the bird sits can be identified as a Plumeria. This is not a plant native to India, but instead is a native to Central and South America. However, since their branches continue to produce flowers after they have been uprooted, the Plumeria tree is often regarded as a sacred symbol of immortality, referred to as the Champa or Temple Tree. It is also prized for its scent: in the Jahangirnama, the Mughal emperor described it as ‘a flower of increasingly sweet fragrance […] when in flower, one tree will perfume a garden’. The folding edges of the petals are no less carefully observed by Zayn al-Din than the details of the bird, contributing to an overall composition which easily ranks among the finest paintings in this iconic group.