This large and impressive illustration is of a juvenile or immature Painted Stork (Mycteria Leucocephala), depicted with its grey plumage and yellow bill, eating a snail. The Painted Stork is native to India, where it is a widespread resident of coastal and inland wetlands, feeding on molluscs and fish. The inscription at lower left identifies the species as "jankhal", which is a general name for herons and related species in Hindi and Persian. The present example has been identified previously as a Milky Stork (Mycteria Cinerea, Falk and Hayter 1983, unpaginated), which is native to Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Milky Stork is usually much whiter in its plumage in comparison and has a more pinkish-red head.

Lady Impey had a special interest in large wading birds. She commissioned Zayn al-Din to paint several illustrations of waders including storks, cranes, herons and egrets between 1780 and 1782. An illustration of an adult Painted Stork by Zayn al-Din dated 1782 was sold in these rooms, 23 October 1992, lot 493. It was formerly in the Ehrenfeld Collection and is published in Bautze 1998, no.90, pp.300-2. Another comparable illustration is of an Asian Openbill Stork with its neck lowered to eat a snail by Shaykh Zayn al-Din, painted in 1781, the same year as the present illustration. It was previously in the collection of the Earls of Derby and V.S. Naipaul and is now in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut (acc.no.B2016.26). A further illustration of a Painted Stork from the Impey series by Ram Das sold at Christie’s London, 13 June 1983, lot 24.

Shaykh Zayn al-Din was Lady Impey’s chief artist and started working for her in 1777. By 1779-80, he had moved away from depicting his bird and animal subjects on branches of trees and with the occasional narrow bands of landscape. He was now more focused on simplified compositions and mostly portraying a single subject against a plain white background. These illustrations of large waders were among the last paintings Zayn al-Din worked on for the Impeys. No dated Impey works by him after 1783 are known.

The present painting was formerly in the collection of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She travelled to India and Pakistan with her sister, Lee Radziwill, in March 1962. She was known to be fond of Indian painting, and the journalist Suzy Menkes noted in a New York Times article regarding the Sotheby’s sale of her estate in 1996: "…What a taste for the exotic! The woman who insisted on seeing the Taj Mahal by moonlight and riding an elephant with her sister, Lee Radziwill, on a trip to Pakistan was drawn to miniatures of Mogul gardens" (Published on 6 March 1996). Her interest in the artwork of the Subcontinent may have also been fuelled by her friendship with the renowned American academic, curator, teacher and collector, Stuart Cary Welch, whose legacy in the field of Indian and Middle Eastern Art reached beyond his positions as Lecturer at Harvard University and Curator at Harvard Art Museums (and whose collection of Islamic and Indian art was sold in these rooms, 6 April and 31 May 2011).

For further discussion on the Impey series and for other illustrations from the series in the present sale, see lots 13, 14 and 16.