AN ARMY APPROACHES A FORT BY A RIVER, ILLUSTRATION FROM A MUGHAL MANUSCRIPT, INDIA, POPULAR MUGHAL, EARLY 17TH CENTURY, REPAINTED EARLY 19TH CENTURY

Ex-collection Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817).

Spink & Sons, London, 1960s. 

Julius Caesar Ibbetson was an 18^th-century British water-colourist and landscape painter. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, and was the official draughtsman to Colonel Charles Cathcart on the first British Embassy to Peking in 1787.

This miniature probably depicts an episode from one of the many Mughal historical manuscripts produced in the late sixteenth century. The upper half of the composition shows an army approaching a fort by a river, from which a single mounted warrior rides out. In the lower half a general or ruler is having his head shaved by a barber in his encampment. The style of the paintings suggests a sub-imperial manuscript of the early seventeenth century, but it has been extensively repainted in the early nineteenth century, the faces of several figures suggesting Delhi work of circa 1800-20.