Lucknow School, circa 1785, possibly after a lost painting by Johann Zoffany

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Indian Miniatures from the Collection of William and Mildred Archer William Archer, "Bill" to his many friends, is well known today as the author of many books on Indian miniatures, notably the two-volume Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills published in 1973, which still remains the most thorough resource on the subject. Yet his life as a scholar in this field was his second career, taken up almost by chance. He and Mildred ("Tim") met when Bill was already through Cambridge and studying Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, on his way to successfully applying to join the Indian Colonial Service (ICS) in 1931. Three years later they married and Tim travelled out to India to join Bill in his posting to the province of Bihar in north-east India. By his own choice he was in the more remote areas where, as noted by their friend Giles Eyre, "it was sometimes wiser to follow Indian precedent, while keeping within British law. In such a way, Bill chose to be guided by his own moral sense - even if colonial tradition sanctioned otherwise". They spent considerable amounts of time among the tribal peoples of the region, with Bill in time publishing translations of their poetry while Tim learned Hindi. In time their postings changed, although remaining within the region; Bill was appointed Deputy Commissioner and District Magistrate in Patna and then Dumka before his final posting in the uplands occupied by the Naga tribes where they stayed until a little after Independence. In their period in India both Bill and Tim already had chances to appreciate the art of the region. Just before the end of their time there Bill published a small work on primitive Indian sculpture, The Vertical Man. At about the same time Tim published Patna Painting, showing her increased interest in the same field. 1948 saw their return to an England that appeared very grim in contrast, particularly in the years immediately after the War. After a short while however he was recommended to apply for and obtained a ten-year role as Keeper of the Indian Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It had been recommended as a position where "life was by no means arduous, lunch hours were infinitely extendable and the director was hardly ever there". Having decided to take up the challenge however Bill approached it with renewed energy. As he says in his memoirs ,"unless one worked at it, the post would have no meaning. Begrudge time, hold oneself back, and the job went sour". He began by sorting out the collection, weeding out a number of items which were mostly accepted by other institutions. He decided that his main main area of specialisation should be miniatures, where the museum's collection was particularly strong, and an area which had been considerably enhanced by the donation by P.C. Manuk and Miss G.M.Coles, which was shortly to be added to by the purchase of miniatures from Sir William Rothenstein. Thus began a very fruitful time, one which he referred to later as "the happiest period of my life". His work concentrated particularly on the schools of the various kingdoms in the Punjab Hills, attempting to separate out the various elements so that not everything was attributed to Kangra. Friendship with M.S.Randhawa, which sprang from the latter's reading of an early publication by Bill on the subject, led to a series of visits around the region, studying the collections that still remained with royal families, as well as looking closely at the topography. In 1954 Bill was asked to catalogue miniatures at the India Office Library, having been told that there were not many. He did not have the time, but recommended that Tim be asked to do the job. Thus began a task which had her searching through old files, shelves, cases and envelopes, unearthing and then cataloguing the miniatures. What had been billed as a job that would only take a few weeks, eventually lasted for twenty-five years. Tim's catalogues, partly written with Toby Falk, are as important in the field as any, forming a magnificent record of one of the most impressive collections of paintings to have been formed in the West. The Archers' work and devotion to the field of Indian Paintings was not just academic. While in India they had made a point of visiting artists and collectors, thoroughly enjoying discussions about artistic movements and aesthetics with artists such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy. Their 1943 portait in the bungalow at Dumka reproduced above shows one of Jamini Roy's earlier paintings on the shelf behind them. Similarly they met a number of Hindu and Muslim collectors of paintings and, beginning while they were still in India, began to buy on their own account. It was a period of great opportunity for anybody interested in the field, with a number of good collections appearing on the market. Thus the collection has a number of paintings from series which are mostly now in museums, such as the early Mewar Bhagvata Purana paintings and the illustration from the sixteenth century aur Canda (lots 78-80). As is not surprising however the strength of the collection is in paintings from the Pahari schools that Bill spent so much of his later professional life researching. As Giles Eyre noted, "a discussion about attribution of any problem picture would often lead, after supper, to a session on the living room carpet. .... riddles of this kind were treated with as much enjoyment as seriousness. Bill was the instigator of disrespect for past opinions while Tim was initially more circumspect. They worked perfectly together as a team, both with a strong aversion to academic humbug". His unstuffy response to the paintings is clearly demonstrated in some of his captions to his own paintings. Thus lot 54 is described as "Here is the very essence of clammy snake-hood, succulent, soft, and in its corpselike pallor posessing a slimy majesty which takes it out of this world". Or with respect to Raja Shamsher Sen (lot 74) "Here the great lazy figure, ...., his oafish face puffing out spirals of hookah smoke, looks vacantly at the old courtier who respectfully stands before him". He was certainly not an author who had to praise his own paintings, thus "The girl musician," (lot 56) "who stands against a tepid yellow bacjkground, has the vapid staidness associated with many members of her profession". From the portraits of rulers to the lyrical Basohli depiction of Krishna and the gopis (lot 49) and the magnificent Mankot depiction of Krishna pursued by Kaljaman (lot 57), this collection goes some way to demonstrate the breadth and variety of the paintings of this area. Many of the paintings in the collection feature in one or more of the many publications on Indian Painting that Bill and Tim wrote, demonstrating how their hobby was also a part of their professional life. For the last ten years almost all these paintings have been on load to the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. It is with great pleasure that we can now offer them for sale at Chirstie's. Unless stated otherwise, all quotes in this introduction are taken from William and Mildred Archer's India served and Observed, London, 1994 and its introduction by Giles Eyre.

Lucknow School, circa 1785, possibly after a lost painting by Johann Zoffany

Colonel Antoine-Louis Polier enjoying a nautch at his house in Lucknow

Details

Lucknow School, circa 1785, possibly after a lost painting by Johann Zoffany
Colonel Antoine-Louis Polier enjoying a nautch at his house in Lucknow
watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gold
12 1/8 x 13½ in. (30.8 x 34.3)

Provenance

The Collection of William and Mildred Archer.

Literature

M. Archer, India and British Portraiture, London, 1979, pl. 39.

Exhibited

New York, Room for Wonder: Indian Painting during the British Period 1760-1880, 1978, no. 36
London, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Indian Heritage: Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule, 1982, no. 90.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Colonel Antoine Louis Henri Polier (1741-95) was an adventurer working for first the French and then the English East India Companies. Of Swiss Protestant origin, he joined the English Company after the defeat of the French in southern India. In 1761 he became a Captain Lieutenant in the Company's Engineers. Although promoted to Major in 1767, he found further promotion blocked by the Company's ruling against officers of foreign extraction rising further in its service. Warren Hastings (Governor-General of Bengal, 1773-84) arranged for him to go to Oudh to work as engineer and architect to the Nawab Shujah-ud-Dowlah (1754-75) at the court in Faizabad. Driven from his post through the machinations of Hastings's enemies on the Council in Calcutta, Polier took refuge in the service of the Mughal emperor in Delhi, but was able to return to Oudh in 1780, after Hastings had regained control of his Council, to serve the new Nawab Asaph-ud-Dowlah (1775-97) in Lucknow, the former capital of the province. In Oudh and Delhi, Polier collected spectacularly well both 17th and 18th Century Indian miniatures as well as Persian and other Indian manuscripts. He both collected the best antique work he could find, as well as commissioning new work principally through his favoured retained artist Mihr Chand who was largely responsible for arranging the layout and decoration of the albums made for his collection of paintings. After his return to Europe 1789, Polier sold most of his albums to the collector William Beckford, whence they found their way to Hamilton Palace and then to Berlin. Other albums were dispersed from the collection earlier.

Polier commissioned two portraits of himself dressed in Mughal costume and enjoying the domestic felicity of a nabob. One of them is the painting signed by Mihr Chand, now in the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan's collection, showing Polier seated on a sofa on a terrace and smoking a hookah while watching a nautch (fig. 1). This probably dates from Polier's first period of duty in Oudh 1773-5. The other, the present painting, shows Polier seated on cushions in the veranda of what must have been his house in Lucknow, watching dancing girls and musicians. This painting is clearly based very closely on a European original. Much new light has been shed on Polier's life and collections through the recent publication of his Persian letters written in 1773-79, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: the I'jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773-79) of ... Polier, trans. and ed. by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, Delhi, 2001, includes letters to Mihr Chand after Polier had been obliged to quit Oudh, in which he treats the artist as part of his household. Although Mildred Archer and previous writers have regarded this painting as based on a now lost oil by Tilly Kettle of 1772, this attribution must be revised in the light of Polier's letters, which allow his precise movements at this period to be followed. Kettle had returned to Calcutta in early 1773 after painting various portraits of the Nawab Shujah-ud-Dowlah in Faizabad, but Polier did not reach the Oudh capital until the rainy season of that same year. The painting is far more complicated in its subtle compositional layers than anything Kettle had attempted in India, and resembles strongly the painting of the Impey family listening to music, which Zoffany had painted in Calcutta in 1783 just before his departure for Lucknow, the new capital of Oudh under the new Nawab Asaf al-Daula since 1775. If a lost oil by Zoffany infact underlies this present painting, then it can be dated to the mid-1780s. Colonel Polier and his friends are the subject of one of Zoffany's most famous Indian paintings, now in the Victoria Memorial, Calcutta. Scenes of the domestic life of rich Europeans in India are comparatively rare, and the two Polier paintings are comparable with another well known contemporary painting in a private collection showing Lady Impey directing her household in Calcutta (fig. 2) as well as lot 43 showing Sir John Dalling attending a nautch at Tanjore 1785-86.

Western attitudes to the nautch seem to have hardened during the 19th Century; Mrs Kindersley in her Letter from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil and the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies, 1777, pp. 231-2 says 'It is difficult to give you any proper idea of this entertainment; which is so very delightful ... the performance consists chiefly in a continual removing of the shawl, first over the head, then off again; extending first one hand, then the other; the feet are likewise moved, though a yard of ground would be sufficent for the whole performance. But it is their languishing glances, wanton smiles, and attitudes not quite consistent with decency, which are so much admired', however in 1835 Miss Roberts writes in her Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, pp. 186-7 'The dancing ... though not equally barbarous, is exceedingly tiresome, when, as in the presence of ladies, it is circumscribed within the bounds of propriety; but there are some European gentlemen who acquire the native taste for an exhibition which, when addressed to male eyes alone, is said to be not particularly decorous.' (for further contemporary accounts of the nautch see K.K. Dyson, A Various Universe, A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent 1765-1856, Oxford, 2002, pp. 336-356).

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