A ROYAL ELEPHANT, INDIA, DECCAN, AHMADNAGAR, CIRCA 1590-95

Ink heightened with colours and gold on paper

Formerly in the Sevadjian Collection, Paris.

Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches: 16th through 19th Centuries, The Asia House Gallery, New York, 1976
The Art of India and Pakistan, Duke University, Durham; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis; Speed Art Musuem, Louisville, 1985

Welch 1963c, p.11
Welch 1976, no.36, pp.76-77
Beach 1978, fig.1, p.21
Zebrowski 1983, no.16, p.28

Generally fair condition. Some patches of slight discolouration. Central horizontal crease worn through and re-joined, but without re-touching. 1 cm. horizontal strip of early extension paper across top of drawing. Borders cut horizontally and re-joined. As viewed
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This splendid portrait of a running elephant is one of the great drawings from the Deccani school of Ahmadnagar. The drawing is by the same hand as a scene of a Royal Picnic in the India Office Library, London, which shows Sultan Burhan II enthroned under a tree with attendants (see Zebrowski 1983, fig.17, Falk and Archer 1981, no.401). Both Falk and Archer, and Beach (1978, p.21) note the stylistic influence of Persian painting in this and other Ahmadnagar drawings of the period, Falk going so far as to identify the Qazwin school and the artist Muhammadi. It also shows influence from contemporary Mughal art. However, like so much of Deccani art, this drawing is imbued with a sense of something quite distinctive, un-Iranian and un-Mughal; an intangible feeling of playful motion, a vibrancy and a spirited, almost ethereal character, which is a hallmark of Deccani work. Beach described the drawing in glowing terms as follows:

"[A drawing of an elephant] from Ahmadnagar in the Deccan is in a non-Mughal Indian style very close to contemporary Iranian taste. It is a tense, superbly controlled drawing, full of vitality. The aliveness is less due to the subject than to the line, which, by twisting and turning, becoming thicker and thinner, forces our eyes continually to move over the surface. Such details as the bottom of the saddle cloth show us that the line, while suggestive of particular objects, moves quite independently of them. It is the rhythm of the line, not that of the saddle cloth, that we observe." (Beach 1978, p.21)

Zebrowski described it as a "superb line drawing" and discussed it as follows:
Running Elephant.... has the fast, furious mood of Akbar's illustrated manuscripts. However, strong decorative patterns, like the elephants coiled trunk, curved tail and stippled hide, dominate the painting in a way which is alien to Mughal realism." (Zebrowski 1983, p.27)