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拍品专文
INSCRIPTIONS:
In the lower left, 'chowta dantnia, In the Collection of Lady Impey Calcutta, painted by Bhawani Das 1783'
Dated to the year that Lord and Lady Impey returned to England, this painting is signed by Bhawani Das. The artist – a Hindu from Patna – first began working on the Impey Album around 1780, probably as an assistant to Zayn al-Din. Together with Ram Das, he quickly developed his style and soon was signing his work and producing compositions that were every bit as competent as his masters, such as the magnificent fruit bat sold at Sotheby's London, 27 October 2021, lot 54. By 1783 Andrew Topsfield suggests he may have been the only artist still in Lady Impey’s service and seems to have spent most of those final months capturing likenesses of lizards, snakes, insects, and fish.
Though the Impey Album is mainly remembered for its ornithological paintings, fish had featured right from the beginning: in the Wellcome Collection there is a depiction of a Mango Fish signed by Zayn al-Din and dated 1777 (ref.566778i). It was Bhawani Das, however, who found his niche painting marine subjects, including a study of a pufferfish, which is also in the Wellcome collection (Andrew Topsfield, 'The natural history paintings of Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das', in William Dalrymple (ed.), Forgotten Masters: Indian Paintings for the East India Company, London, 2019, p.74). The shift away from birds and towards fish and reptiles likely reflects a change in Lady Impey’s own tastes. Perhaps she had grown bored of birds, or even run out of new species to have painted. She may also have been attracted to the relatively unknown subject of Gangetic fish, and the many species which – as the note on this painting shows – as yet had no European name, and were as yet undiscovered by Western science.
If the birds of India were relatively well known among Europeans by the late eighteenth century, its marine life remained more elusive. It was not until 1822 that this species was first described as the Coius Datnia by the naturalist Francis Buchanan Hamilton. He notes that it is a ‘very beautiful fish, from six to ten inches in length,’ and that it is ‘found in all mouths of the Ganges, and is common in the Calcutta market,’ although it is ‘not near so good to eat as the [Coius] Vacti’ (Francis Hamilton, An account of the fishes found in the river Ganges and its branches, Edinburgh, 1822, p. 89) Interestingly, when naming fish Hamilton based his designations on terms used in local parlance: hence Coius Datnia took its name from the term used by local fishermen, which is rendered in the note on this painting as ‘Chowta Dantnia’. Today, scientists generally refer to it as the Bengal Yellowfin Seabream (Acanthropagus Datnia). Though Hamilton may have been the first to publish a taxonomy for the fish, this painting may be the first time it became known to European zoology.
In the lower left, 'chowta dantnia, In the Collection of Lady Impey Calcutta, painted by Bhawani Das 1783'
Dated to the year that Lord and Lady Impey returned to England, this painting is signed by Bhawani Das. The artist – a Hindu from Patna – first began working on the Impey Album around 1780, probably as an assistant to Zayn al-Din. Together with Ram Das, he quickly developed his style and soon was signing his work and producing compositions that were every bit as competent as his masters, such as the magnificent fruit bat sold at Sotheby's London, 27 October 2021, lot 54. By 1783 Andrew Topsfield suggests he may have been the only artist still in Lady Impey’s service and seems to have spent most of those final months capturing likenesses of lizards, snakes, insects, and fish.
Though the Impey Album is mainly remembered for its ornithological paintings, fish had featured right from the beginning: in the Wellcome Collection there is a depiction of a Mango Fish signed by Zayn al-Din and dated 1777 (ref.566778i). It was Bhawani Das, however, who found his niche painting marine subjects, including a study of a pufferfish, which is also in the Wellcome collection (Andrew Topsfield, 'The natural history paintings of Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das', in William Dalrymple (ed.), Forgotten Masters: Indian Paintings for the East India Company, London, 2019, p.74). The shift away from birds and towards fish and reptiles likely reflects a change in Lady Impey’s own tastes. Perhaps she had grown bored of birds, or even run out of new species to have painted. She may also have been attracted to the relatively unknown subject of Gangetic fish, and the many species which – as the note on this painting shows – as yet had no European name, and were as yet undiscovered by Western science.
If the birds of India were relatively well known among Europeans by the late eighteenth century, its marine life remained more elusive. It was not until 1822 that this species was first described as the Coius Datnia by the naturalist Francis Buchanan Hamilton. He notes that it is a ‘very beautiful fish, from six to ten inches in length,’ and that it is ‘found in all mouths of the Ganges, and is common in the Calcutta market,’ although it is ‘not near so good to eat as the [Coius] Vacti’ (Francis Hamilton, An account of the fishes found in the river Ganges and its branches, Edinburgh, 1822, p. 89) Interestingly, when naming fish Hamilton based his designations on terms used in local parlance: hence Coius Datnia took its name from the term used by local fishermen, which is rendered in the note on this painting as ‘Chowta Dantnia’. Today, scientists generally refer to it as the Bengal Yellowfin Seabream (Acanthropagus Datnia). Though Hamilton may have been the first to publish a taxonomy for the fish, this painting may be the first time it became known to European zoology.