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Lot Essay
This outstanding painting of Colonel Polier watching a nautch is one of the most important and iconic images from late 18th century Mughal India. Signed by the artist Mihr Chand, it is flawlessly balanced and exquisitely detailed. It has been described by Malini Roy as the artist’s finest painting and his most important work (Roy in Markel 2010, p.181; Roy 2009, p.117), while Cary Welch described it as one of Mihr Chand’s outstanding pictures (Welch 1978, p.84). With the distinctive floral borders and illuminated shamsa on the reverse associated with the well-known Polier Albums, it has long been recognised as one of the most significant of all the folios from the albums he commissioned during his years in India.
THE PAINTING
The composition and exquisite details are worth exploring closely. Colonel Polier, wearing white Mughal-style garments embroidered with gold sits on a European-style couch upholstered in yellow cloth (probably silk), which is decorated with a repeating pattern of small flowering stems of green, red, blue and white. Mihr Chand has shown his attention to naturalistic detail in the pleated cloth on the fore-edge of the couch and the ends of the two cushions, as well as in the legs of the couch, in which the grain of the wood is clearly visible. Polier’s turban is of orange-red with a gold band typical of Awadhi fashion of the period, with a jewelled sarpech, and he wears white socks, suggesting the retention of an element of European sartorial behaviour in his otherwise Mughal garments. He is smoking an ornate gold and silver huqqa, and the mouthpiece is clearly recognisable as being of pale green jade set with gemstones. Beside the couch is a European tripod table on which are silver vessels set with pearls and gems. Behind Polier are two male attendants with blue striped turbans and gold jewellery hanging from their fingers. In front of Polier are four tall candles encased in glass lamps. In the centre of the terrace two dancing girls dressed in pink and orange robes perform their nautch, and beyond them stand four musicians dressed in white with coloured turbans and sashes. On the upper edge of the terrace balustrade is a row of candles in lotus-form lamps set in a bed of green leaves. Beyond the terrace is a silvery lake, on the far bank of which a crowd of attendants have erected a wide frame hung with hundreds of candles and further lotus-forms lamps. The frame and lamps are reflected in the surface of the lake. Further into the distance, marshalled by further attendants, a pulsating fireworks display erupts into the sky, providing a brilliant contrast with the composed scene on the terrace.
The sense of depth of the terrace is emphasised by the use of perspective in the wall, awning and couch at the left, and the theatricality of the scene is enhanced by Mihr Chand’s brilliant use of colour and shadow. The scene occurs at night, as shown by the dark skies in the distance, the exploding fireworks and the candles and lamps in the foreground, which bathe the white terrace in light, creating a stage-like setting. The two dancing girls stand out in their pink and red garments, while the musicians are dressed in white with flashes of colour in their turbans, waistband and musical instruments. The figures are framed by the strong yellow of the couch, the red of the awning and the dark brown of the background. The effect is powerful and dramatic. Maya Jasanoff described Polier as someone who “fashioned himself socially as a European orientalist while privately he lived as a Mughal nobleman, effecting his self-transformation partly through the collecting of art” (quoted in Markel 2010, p.33), and this painting is a perfect visual manifestation of this synchronism.
THE VERSO AND BORDERS
The reverse of the folio is decorated with a full page of illumination centred round a large sunburst medallion (shamsa), identifying this folio as a frontispiece to one of the albums commissioned by Polier from Mihr Chand and his studio (Roy 2024, p.191). The illumination is very close in style and form to the frontispieces on other Polier Albums, for example, those in the Berlin Museum (I. 4596, fol. 30v), the Victoria and Albert Museum (MSL/1858⁄4765), and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1982.2.70.10). Unusually however, the central disc of the shamsa on the present folio is had been left blank, whereas in other examples there are inscriptions (see below for further details on the wider group of Polier Albums).
The borders are also typical of the Polier Albums. The borders surrounding the nautch scene consist of brown and blue margins decorated with scrolling floral tendrils and naturalistic sprays of flowers in gold and silver. The borders of the reverse are decorated with naturalistic polychrome stems of flowers on plain cream ground, with inner and outer bands of small gold and silver leafy tendrils. The large polychrome flowers on the reverse are closest to the style associated with border an painter dubbed artist C by Imbert (see Imbert in Weis 2024, pp.225-231).
POLIER, HIS PATRONAGE AND COLLECTING
Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier was born in Lausanne 1741 to a well-to-do family of French origin with a military and intellectual heritage and with connections to India. His uncle Paul-Phillipe Polier had served in India in the mid-18th century, and the younger Polier entered the service of the British East India Company as a surveyor, arriving in India in 1758. By 1762, he had become Chief Engineer of the Bengal Army in Calcutta and began working on the design and construction of the new Fort William, rising to the rank of major and being awarded command of the garrison. In 1773 he was posted to Awadh as a surveyor, working both for the East India Company and for Nawab Shuja al-Dawla (r. 1754-75), residing in Faizabad until 1775. Soon after the accession Nawab Asaf al-Dawla (r. 1775-97) in Awadh, Polier left Faizabad and moved temporarily to Delhi, offering his services to Emperor Shah Alam II. He returned to Awadh via Benares in 1780, and took up the post of chief architect and engineer to Nawab Asaf al-Dawla, residing in Lucknow. Apart from a brief interruption in late 1781, he remained there, with the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the East India Company, until he returned to Europe in 1788. Alam and Alavi described him as a “Persianate Mughal Noble” (Alam and Alavi, p.69). On his return to Europe he resided initially in Lausanne, later moving to France and settling near Avignon. In February 1795 tragedy struck when he was murdered by a band of robbers. For a full biography of Polier see Veyrassat 2022.
During his time in India, Polier collected a very large numbers of Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic manuscripts, Indian miniatures and calligraphies, and he possessed a complete collection of the Vedas. The paintings he acquired included earlier Mughal paintings as well as works commissioned by him from artists in Awadh, principally his favourite artist Mihr Chand, who was largely responsible for arranging the layout, decoration and binding of the albums into which the paintings were assembled.
Polier’s letters in Persian contain a wealth of valuable and interesting information about his activities as a patron and collector (for a summary, see Alam and Alavi 2001, pp. 52-6). Among them are numerous letters to Mihr Chand, leaving no doubt that Mihr Chand was not only Polier’s chief artist, but that he also had a supervisory role, akin to that of head of an atelier. The letters include detailed instructions to Mihr Chand on what paintings to work on, the employment of other artists, illuminators and binders, how to prepare and decorate the paper, the style and size of the albums and more (Alam and Alavi 2001 as indexed, Roy 2009). One particularly interesting and pertinent letter appears to relate directly to the present painting. On 9 Jumada I 1189 AH Polier, who was in Calcutta at the time meeting with officials of the East India Company, wrote to Mihr Chand in Faizabad saying “I have learnt from Mr Martin’s letter that you are preparing a painting of the dance … prepare a draft of the painting of the dance. I will see the draft when I come back and then you can finalize it as per my instructions.” (Alam and Alavi, pp.266-7; Roy gives the date of the letter as 9 Jumada I AH 1188 (18 July 1774), but the dates of Polier’s letters preceding and following this one, which are in sequence, are dated 1189 AH).
A slightly later glimpse of such albums in Polier’s home in Lucknow is found in the famous oil painting by John Zoffany “Colonel Polier with his friends Claude Martin and John Wombwell” (ca.1786-7, Victoria Memorial, Kolkata, see Archer 1979, col. pl.VII). On the table beside Polier three albums and a manuscript are clearly visible, two of the albums lying open displaying Indian miniatures on the visible pages.
Polier was in the habit of gifting paintings and even whole albums to friends and colleagues (see Weis 2024, pp. 163-71). He purchased Mughal miniatures for Sir Philip Francis, a senior member of the East India Company in Bengal (Subrahmanyan 2000, p.54), while in one of his letters he explains that he has sent a “Moracka of fine Oriental writings” to Sir William Jones, the early Orientalist scholar. He had sent it through Warren Hastings, but Hastings had forgotten to send it on to Jones and as a result Polier sent another album to Jones and asked that Hastings keep the first album as a “small token of my gratitude & regard” (letter dated 15 July 1786, British Library, Add MS 29170, fol.129, quoted in Stronge 2019, p.140). Another example is the album presented by Polier to Lady Coote, the wife of his friend and supporter Sir Eyre Coote (of which seventeen pages are preserved in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1982.2.70.1-16 and 1983.2.12). The majority of albums, however, returned with Polier to Europe in 1788. Many were subsequently acquired by the well-known English collector William Beckford. On Beckford's death these mostly passed to his daughter, the Duchess of Hamilton, and were acquired by the Berlin Museums at the 1882 auction of the Hamilton Palace Library. Others are in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, the Wellcome Collection Library, London and the Asian Arts Museum of San Francisco. Parts of his manuscript collections are in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris and the Libraries of King’s College, Cambridge and Eton College, held at Cambridge University Library. For the albums and paintings see Hickman and Enderlein 1979; von Gladiss 2010; Markel 2010; Stronge and Atighi-Moghadam 2018; Weis 2024.
MIHR CHAND THE ARTIST
Mihr Chand (fl.1750s-1780s) was a superlative artist – brilliantly skilled in a wide variety of styles and formidably adaptable, producing masterpieces in the classical Mughal style inherited from his father Ganga Ram (who was also an artist) and earlier generations of Mughal painters, as well as in the Europeanised approach favoured by some of his patrons. Malini Roy, who has studied Mihr Chand and his works in great detail, described him as “exceptionally skilled in portraiture” (Losty and Roy 2012, p.168) and suggested that “it was Mihr Chand's thirst for new knowledge that prompted the artist to evaluate the visual resources available and assimilate these new techniques within his works.” (Roy 2009, p.3). Terence McInerney wrote “The great artist Mihr Chand embodies the delicious schizophrenia of the Faizabad years. He made skilful copies of Tilly Kettle’s paintings, as well as eighteenth-century, high-style Mughal works that would have been admired by Chitarman II” (McInerney 2019, p.98). Mihr Chand was highly innovative and had great originality and enormous range. He produced portraits, group scenes, equestrian portraits, and architectural and topographical views, mastering one-point perspective as well as other new concepts. He worked for several patrons, including Prince Ali Gawhar/Shah Alam II, Shuja al-Dawla and Polier, and spent most of his career in Delhi, Allahabad and Faizabad. For the most detailed study of Mihr Chand see Roy 2009; see also Markel 2010, as indexed; Weis 2024, as indexed.
THE LATER PROVENANCE
The present folio was acquired from the London booksellers Howell and Stuart in 1834 by the great 19th century antiquarian and bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt. (1792-1872), who is recognised as one of the greatest European collectors of manuscripts and books. He was educated at Rugby School and Oxford University and was an avid collector from an early age, amassing over 60,000 manuscripts and 40,000 printed books during his lifetime, a collection covering all cultures and historical periods. Towards the end of his life he was in negotiations to transfer his collection to national ownership, but at his death in 1872 these had not concluded. The subsequent dispersal of his collection took nearly 100 years, from the late 1880s to the late 1970s. The sale in which the present folio appeared was one of the last, held in late 1974 (Biblitheca Phillippica, Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts, Indian and Persian Miniatures, Sotheby’s, London, 27 November 1974, lot 723). For further information on Sir Thomas Phillipps and his collection see Munby 1951-60; Munby 1967; DNB, DWB.
THE PAINTING
The composition and exquisite details are worth exploring closely. Colonel Polier, wearing white Mughal-style garments embroidered with gold sits on a European-style couch upholstered in yellow cloth (probably silk), which is decorated with a repeating pattern of small flowering stems of green, red, blue and white. Mihr Chand has shown his attention to naturalistic detail in the pleated cloth on the fore-edge of the couch and the ends of the two cushions, as well as in the legs of the couch, in which the grain of the wood is clearly visible. Polier’s turban is of orange-red with a gold band typical of Awadhi fashion of the period, with a jewelled sarpech, and he wears white socks, suggesting the retention of an element of European sartorial behaviour in his otherwise Mughal garments. He is smoking an ornate gold and silver huqqa, and the mouthpiece is clearly recognisable as being of pale green jade set with gemstones. Beside the couch is a European tripod table on which are silver vessels set with pearls and gems. Behind Polier are two male attendants with blue striped turbans and gold jewellery hanging from their fingers. In front of Polier are four tall candles encased in glass lamps. In the centre of the terrace two dancing girls dressed in pink and orange robes perform their nautch, and beyond them stand four musicians dressed in white with coloured turbans and sashes. On the upper edge of the terrace balustrade is a row of candles in lotus-form lamps set in a bed of green leaves. Beyond the terrace is a silvery lake, on the far bank of which a crowd of attendants have erected a wide frame hung with hundreds of candles and further lotus-forms lamps. The frame and lamps are reflected in the surface of the lake. Further into the distance, marshalled by further attendants, a pulsating fireworks display erupts into the sky, providing a brilliant contrast with the composed scene on the terrace.
The sense of depth of the terrace is emphasised by the use of perspective in the wall, awning and couch at the left, and the theatricality of the scene is enhanced by Mihr Chand’s brilliant use of colour and shadow. The scene occurs at night, as shown by the dark skies in the distance, the exploding fireworks and the candles and lamps in the foreground, which bathe the white terrace in light, creating a stage-like setting. The two dancing girls stand out in their pink and red garments, while the musicians are dressed in white with flashes of colour in their turbans, waistband and musical instruments. The figures are framed by the strong yellow of the couch, the red of the awning and the dark brown of the background. The effect is powerful and dramatic. Maya Jasanoff described Polier as someone who “fashioned himself socially as a European orientalist while privately he lived as a Mughal nobleman, effecting his self-transformation partly through the collecting of art” (quoted in Markel 2010, p.33), and this painting is a perfect visual manifestation of this synchronism.
THE VERSO AND BORDERS
The reverse of the folio is decorated with a full page of illumination centred round a large sunburst medallion (shamsa), identifying this folio as a frontispiece to one of the albums commissioned by Polier from Mihr Chand and his studio (Roy 2024, p.191). The illumination is very close in style and form to the frontispieces on other Polier Albums, for example, those in the Berlin Museum (I. 4596, fol. 30v), the Victoria and Albert Museum (MSL/1858⁄4765), and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1982.2.70.10). Unusually however, the central disc of the shamsa on the present folio is had been left blank, whereas in other examples there are inscriptions (see below for further details on the wider group of Polier Albums).
The borders are also typical of the Polier Albums. The borders surrounding the nautch scene consist of brown and blue margins decorated with scrolling floral tendrils and naturalistic sprays of flowers in gold and silver. The borders of the reverse are decorated with naturalistic polychrome stems of flowers on plain cream ground, with inner and outer bands of small gold and silver leafy tendrils. The large polychrome flowers on the reverse are closest to the style associated with border an painter dubbed artist C by Imbert (see Imbert in Weis 2024, pp.225-231).
POLIER, HIS PATRONAGE AND COLLECTING
Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier was born in Lausanne 1741 to a well-to-do family of French origin with a military and intellectual heritage and with connections to India. His uncle Paul-Phillipe Polier had served in India in the mid-18th century, and the younger Polier entered the service of the British East India Company as a surveyor, arriving in India in 1758. By 1762, he had become Chief Engineer of the Bengal Army in Calcutta and began working on the design and construction of the new Fort William, rising to the rank of major and being awarded command of the garrison. In 1773 he was posted to Awadh as a surveyor, working both for the East India Company and for Nawab Shuja al-Dawla (r. 1754-75), residing in Faizabad until 1775. Soon after the accession Nawab Asaf al-Dawla (r. 1775-97) in Awadh, Polier left Faizabad and moved temporarily to Delhi, offering his services to Emperor Shah Alam II. He returned to Awadh via Benares in 1780, and took up the post of chief architect and engineer to Nawab Asaf al-Dawla, residing in Lucknow. Apart from a brief interruption in late 1781, he remained there, with the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the East India Company, until he returned to Europe in 1788. Alam and Alavi described him as a “Persianate Mughal Noble” (Alam and Alavi, p.69). On his return to Europe he resided initially in Lausanne, later moving to France and settling near Avignon. In February 1795 tragedy struck when he was murdered by a band of robbers. For a full biography of Polier see Veyrassat 2022.
During his time in India, Polier collected a very large numbers of Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic manuscripts, Indian miniatures and calligraphies, and he possessed a complete collection of the Vedas. The paintings he acquired included earlier Mughal paintings as well as works commissioned by him from artists in Awadh, principally his favourite artist Mihr Chand, who was largely responsible for arranging the layout, decoration and binding of the albums into which the paintings were assembled.
Polier’s letters in Persian contain a wealth of valuable and interesting information about his activities as a patron and collector (for a summary, see Alam and Alavi 2001, pp. 52-6). Among them are numerous letters to Mihr Chand, leaving no doubt that Mihr Chand was not only Polier’s chief artist, but that he also had a supervisory role, akin to that of head of an atelier. The letters include detailed instructions to Mihr Chand on what paintings to work on, the employment of other artists, illuminators and binders, how to prepare and decorate the paper, the style and size of the albums and more (Alam and Alavi 2001 as indexed, Roy 2009). One particularly interesting and pertinent letter appears to relate directly to the present painting. On 9 Jumada I 1189 AH Polier, who was in Calcutta at the time meeting with officials of the East India Company, wrote to Mihr Chand in Faizabad saying “I have learnt from Mr Martin’s letter that you are preparing a painting of the dance … prepare a draft of the painting of the dance. I will see the draft when I come back and then you can finalize it as per my instructions.” (Alam and Alavi, pp.266-7; Roy gives the date of the letter as 9 Jumada I AH 1188 (18 July 1774), but the dates of Polier’s letters preceding and following this one, which are in sequence, are dated 1189 AH).
A slightly later glimpse of such albums in Polier’s home in Lucknow is found in the famous oil painting by John Zoffany “Colonel Polier with his friends Claude Martin and John Wombwell” (ca.1786-7, Victoria Memorial, Kolkata, see Archer 1979, col. pl.VII). On the table beside Polier three albums and a manuscript are clearly visible, two of the albums lying open displaying Indian miniatures on the visible pages.
Polier was in the habit of gifting paintings and even whole albums to friends and colleagues (see Weis 2024, pp. 163-71). He purchased Mughal miniatures for Sir Philip Francis, a senior member of the East India Company in Bengal (Subrahmanyan 2000, p.54), while in one of his letters he explains that he has sent a “Moracka of fine Oriental writings” to Sir William Jones, the early Orientalist scholar. He had sent it through Warren Hastings, but Hastings had forgotten to send it on to Jones and as a result Polier sent another album to Jones and asked that Hastings keep the first album as a “small token of my gratitude & regard” (letter dated 15 July 1786, British Library, Add MS 29170, fol.129, quoted in Stronge 2019, p.140). Another example is the album presented by Polier to Lady Coote, the wife of his friend and supporter Sir Eyre Coote (of which seventeen pages are preserved in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1982.2.70.1-16 and 1983.2.12). The majority of albums, however, returned with Polier to Europe in 1788. Many were subsequently acquired by the well-known English collector William Beckford. On Beckford's death these mostly passed to his daughter, the Duchess of Hamilton, and were acquired by the Berlin Museums at the 1882 auction of the Hamilton Palace Library. Others are in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, the Wellcome Collection Library, London and the Asian Arts Museum of San Francisco. Parts of his manuscript collections are in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris and the Libraries of King’s College, Cambridge and Eton College, held at Cambridge University Library. For the albums and paintings see Hickman and Enderlein 1979; von Gladiss 2010; Markel 2010; Stronge and Atighi-Moghadam 2018; Weis 2024.
MIHR CHAND THE ARTIST
Mihr Chand (fl.1750s-1780s) was a superlative artist – brilliantly skilled in a wide variety of styles and formidably adaptable, producing masterpieces in the classical Mughal style inherited from his father Ganga Ram (who was also an artist) and earlier generations of Mughal painters, as well as in the Europeanised approach favoured by some of his patrons. Malini Roy, who has studied Mihr Chand and his works in great detail, described him as “exceptionally skilled in portraiture” (Losty and Roy 2012, p.168) and suggested that “it was Mihr Chand's thirst for new knowledge that prompted the artist to evaluate the visual resources available and assimilate these new techniques within his works.” (Roy 2009, p.3). Terence McInerney wrote “The great artist Mihr Chand embodies the delicious schizophrenia of the Faizabad years. He made skilful copies of Tilly Kettle’s paintings, as well as eighteenth-century, high-style Mughal works that would have been admired by Chitarman II” (McInerney 2019, p.98). Mihr Chand was highly innovative and had great originality and enormous range. He produced portraits, group scenes, equestrian portraits, and architectural and topographical views, mastering one-point perspective as well as other new concepts. He worked for several patrons, including Prince Ali Gawhar/Shah Alam II, Shuja al-Dawla and Polier, and spent most of his career in Delhi, Allahabad and Faizabad. For the most detailed study of Mihr Chand see Roy 2009; see also Markel 2010, as indexed; Weis 2024, as indexed.
THE LATER PROVENANCE
The present folio was acquired from the London booksellers Howell and Stuart in 1834 by the great 19th century antiquarian and bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt. (1792-1872), who is recognised as one of the greatest European collectors of manuscripts and books. He was educated at Rugby School and Oxford University and was an avid collector from an early age, amassing over 60,000 manuscripts and 40,000 printed books during his lifetime, a collection covering all cultures and historical periods. Towards the end of his life he was in negotiations to transfer his collection to national ownership, but at his death in 1872 these had not concluded. The subsequent dispersal of his collection took nearly 100 years, from the late 1880s to the late 1970s. The sale in which the present folio appeared was one of the last, held in late 1974 (Biblitheca Phillippica, Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts, Indian and Persian Miniatures, Sotheby’s, London, 27 November 1974, lot 723). For further information on Sir Thomas Phillipps and his collection see Munby 1951-60; Munby 1967; DNB, DWB.