The Emperor Shah Jahan watching a wrestling match, attributable to Mir Kalan Khan, Delhi or Lucknow, circa 1750

gouache heightened with gold on paper, laid down on an album page with borders of scrolling red lotus leaves, inscribed in nasta’liq script on recto ‘The picture of Shah Jahan with Princes and Commanders watching a combat of heroes’; and on verso in English ‘The Picture of King Shah Jahan, the Princes his Sons and / The Nobles of the Court viewing a combat of Wrestlers’, collection label '28' adhered to reverse

Sir Thomas Phillipps Bt. (1792-1872)
Trustees of the Robertson Trust
Sotheby's, London, 26 November 1968, Bibliotheca Phillippica, Part IV, lot 440

In good overall condition, slight losses to painting edges, occasional light creases, as viewed.
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This large royal painting shows the emperor Shah Jahan (r.1628-58) watching a wrestling match, and both in style and compositional structure it owes a strong debt to the period of Shah Jahan, a century before it was made. In this it was following a tradition fostered by the remnants of the Mughal royal atelier of looking back to earlier forms and styles for their courtly paintings (see, for example, lot 31 in this catalogue, The Enthronement of Emperor Bahadur Shah I). But despite the ostensible compositional orthodoxy - the emperor looking out of a palace window at a scene of entertainment below, with courtiers gathered to watch in the foreground (for examples from Shah Jahan's reign see Leach 1998, pp.110-15, no.31, Dalrymple and Sharma 2012, p.70, cat.1) - there are already elements of Mir Kalan Khan's idiosyncratic style creeping in. A related painting by the artist, showing the Emperor Jahangir watching an elephant fight, was formerly in the K. Essayan Collection (Drouot, Paris, 27 May 1994, lot 178, catalogued as Mughal, late seventeenth century, in spite of bearing an attribution to Mir Kalan Khan).

Mir Kalan Khan (c.1710-75) began his career at the Mughal court in Delhi under Muhammad Shah (r.1719-48). After the sacking of Delhi by Nadir Shah in 1739, during which the royal library was catastrophically looted, and the subsequent death of their royal patron, many of the leading painters from the court atelier left the capital and sought employment at the courts of the princes and nawabs in the provinces. Mir Kalan Khan may have stayed on in Delhi until circa 1755, after which he moved to Oudh, where he found new patronage at the court of the Nawab Shuja’ al-Daula (r.1753-75). After arriving in Oudh his style became more eclectic and eccentric. For the latest information on his career and illustrations of his work see McInerney in Beach, Fischer and Goswamy 2011, pp.607-622; see also Leach 1998, pp.168-177.

Sir Thomas Phillipps Bt. (1792-1872), to whom this painting belonged, was one of the greatest collectors of manuscripts and miniatures of the nineteenth century. Best known for his collection of Western medieval manuscripts, his Oriental collection was also exceptional. It was assembled from the 1820s to the 1870s, when exceptional material was available, and was marked by a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity as well as artistic interest, with items ranging from early Arabic scientific works through Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic and Sanskrit texts to Persian and Indian painting and poetry and South East Asian talismanic manuscripts. It was sold at Sotheby's, London, in two auctions of nearly a thousand lots in 1968 and 1974, this painting being lot 440 in the 1968 sale (see above for provenance details).