STUDY OF A GINGI VULTURE, FROM A SERIES OF NATURAL HISTORY DRAWINGS MADE FOR LORD VALENTIA, INDIA, CALCUTTA OR BARRACKPUR, CIRCA 1803

Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches 16th Through 19th Centuries, Asia Society, New York; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; The Avery Brundage Collection, 1976
Sahibs, Memsahibs and Maharajas: Indian Art Under British Rule 1765-1880, Harvard Art Museums, 1989

Welch and Bearce 1963, no.46
Welch 1976, no.26, pp.64-65

This large, imposing image of a vulture comes from an important series of natural history studies painted for Viscount Valentia between 1802 and 1806.

George Annesley, 2nd Earl of Mountnorris, styled Viscount Valentia, made a tour of India in a private capacity between 1802 and 1806. He wrote an account of his travels, published in three volumes in London in 1809 under the title Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt in 1802-6. As a keenly interested amateur natural historian he visited many professional botanists and zoologists working in India at the time. In 1804 he met Dr Benjamin Heyne, the East India Company's botanist in the Carnatic, who was then at Bangalore as Superintendent of the Gardens. In the same year he visited Eudelin de Jonville, who was working for the Company on the cultivation of cinnamon while also carrying out research in pearl fishery. Lord Valentia himself commissioned many natural history drawings, mostly of birds. Two such drawings he gave to Lord Wellesley (late first Duke of Wellington), with whom he stayed in Calcutta in 1803. These drawings are now in the British Library (Wellesley Collection, India Office Library), London (Archer M. 1962, p.96).

Another study from the same series is in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, and Leach suggests that these two, plus three others, are by the same hand "so expertly rendered" are they. She goes on to suggest that the quality of this particular group of five within the wider Valentia collection were probably executed at Calcutta, the most sophisticated centre for natural history painting (Leach 1995, vol.II, pp.761-2). Other natural history studies from the Valentia Collection have been sold in these rooms 11December 1968, lot 80; 2 December 1972, lots 4 and 6; 10 April 1989, lots 5-21; and in our New York rooms, 28 October 1991, lot 11. Another is published in Welch 1978, no.18.

The Gingi Vulture (neophron percnopterus ginginianus) is a widespread resident in the Indian subcontinent, though its numbers have depleted dramatically in recent years. It is the same species as the Egyptian Vulture of the Middle East and southern Europe. The ginginianus refers specifically to the Indian resident. The two words inscribed on the paper above the vulture are Gid ('vulture' in Hindustani) and Kargas ('vulture' in Persian).