A view of Paris, North-west India, probably Jaipur, late 18th century

This rare eighteenth-century illustration by an Indian artist of Parisian life along the river Seine, with the Cathedral of Notre Dame visible on the right, is probably based on a European print. For a comparable depiction of another European city, with crowds congregating around the river Tiber in Rome, see Christie’s London, 7 April 2011, lot 278. Three further comparable paintings illustrating Europeans in Indian, rather than European, cities are in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Linda York Leach has suggested that they may have been done in Jaipur in the late eighteenth century. Leach also notes that "European prints of cities like Paris or Venice reached India and impressed artists who borrowed the genre of leisurely city-dwellers promenading, boating, and so on, against a background of elegant buildings." (acc. no.59.10, 59.11, 59.12; L.Y. Leach, Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995, Vol.II, pp.752-5).