Valentine Cameron Prinsep

Sale: Christie's, London, February 23, 1907, lot 52
Sale: Christie's, London, January 24, 1975, lot 136, illustrated
Whitford and Hughes Gallery, London
Peter Nahum, London

London, Royal Academy, 1865, no. 360
London, The Fine Art Society, Eastern Encounters, Orientalist Painters of the Nineteenth Century, June 26-July 1978, no. 114

W. M. Rossetti, "The Royal Academy Exhibtions," Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, vol. 1, 1865, p. 751
"The Royal Academy," Art Journal, vol. 4, 1865, p. 346
Lynn Thornton, Woman as Portrayed in Orientalist Painting, Paris, 1985, p. 30, illustrated 

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work has recently been restored and should be hung in its current state. The canvas has a lining applied with wax as an adhesive. This wax lining can easily be reversed if required. The paint layer is clean and stable. There are no structural damages and no paint losses. While there are a few areas of pigment that read darkly under ultraviolet light in the parrot and black skirt of the figure, it is doubtful that any of these correspond to retouches.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Valentine Prinsep was born in Calcutta, India, and was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father in Indian civil service, yet his interest in writing and art put him on a different path.  Works like The Lady of Tooti-Nameh reveal the early influence of Prinsep’s teachers, like George Frederick Watts as well as the work of his contemporary, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There are a number of Indian genre subjects in the artist’s oeuvre, and his Imperial India, An Artist’s Journals, published in 1879, included his portraits of many of the country’s rulers.  Yet, The Lady of Tooti-Nameh takes a less documentary approach in its depiction of a porcelain-skinned beauty resting with a bright-colored parrot in an Eastern interior. The work’s title derives from the Tutinama, a fourteenth century Persian text credited to Ziya’al-Din Nakhshabi, who translated much of the contents from earlier Indian versions.  The narrator of the Tutinama is a parrot who tells stories to his beautiful owner Khojasta to distract her from temptations while her husband is traveling. (Indeed, the work's secondary title comes from the literal translation “Tales of a Parrot”). The stories were also depicted in Moghul miniatures of the sixteenth century, and Prinsep’s composition may have been modeled after one of them (fig. 1., Thornton, p. 30).  The source material proved more elusive to critics when viewing the work for the first time at the Royal Academy.  One theorized that “the subject of the parrot… we infer to be an enchantress who has changed into a bird of the killing colours” (Rossetti, p. 751).  Ultimately, the story mattered less than the fact that Prinsep’s work was  “painted throughout with remarkable force, spirit, and even splendor,” while another writer boldly pronounced that "attitude.. is everything, and so thought Mr. Prinsep evidently when he threw this figure into pose” (Rossetti, p. 751; “The Royal Academy," p. 346).