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Lot Essay
Though the name of Impeyan Pheasant evokes the Impey Album and the artists active in Calcutta in the late 18th century, there is much to connect it to the contemporaneous Lucknow school. In particular, the miniaturised landscape in the background as well as the brown v-shaped shadow beneath the bird suggest a connection to the paintings executed for Claude Martin. From 1775, Martin began importing large quantities of European watercolour paper to India in order to supply his atelier of artists. Among the paintings done for him are depictions of an Asian Openbill Stork and a Lesser Adjutant, both of which have the same distinctive shadow (William Dalrymple, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, London, 2019, p.35, no.5 and p.59, no.22).
The painting comes from the collection of George Annesley, 2nd Earl of Mountnorris and Viscount Valentia, whose travels between 1802 and 1806 were the subject of his 1809 work Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon and the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt in 1802-06. He started his travels in Calcutta, and is known to have visited people like the botanist and patron Dr William Roxburgh. He was also given two bird paintings by Marquis Wellesley (Mildred Archer, Natural History Drawings in the India Office Library, London, 1962, p.92). He also travelled to Lucknow and visited the home of Claude Martin on 3 June 1803; though he talks at length about the architecture, he is silent about any paintings he might have seen there (Voyages and Travels, Volume 1, London, 1809, pp.162-4). He was certainly no admirer of Martin as a man, recording that 'his character was stained by almost every vice that can disgrace human nature', though this need not have precluded any admiration for his patronage (Voyages and Travels, Volume 1, London, 1809, pp.162-4).
Aside from the paintings gifted to Annesley by Lord Wellesley in 1803, another painting from the series, now in the Chester Beatty Library, is published in Linda York Leach, Mughal and other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995, vol.ii, pp.761-762. Three further paintings formerly belonging to Annesley were sold in these Rooms, 22 May 2008, lots 10-12.