A maiden being led to her bedchamber, with calligraphy by Muhammad Amin al-Mashhadi, Mughal, Delhi or Lucknow, circa 1755-65

Sir Elijah Impey, first Chief Justice of Bengal (1774-83).
Sotheby's London, 8 October 2014, lot 269.

This large album page, with its wide outer margins flecked with gold once belonged to an album compiled by Sir Elijah Impey, the first Chief Justice of Bengal from 1774-83. Sir Elijah and Lady Impey are known for commissioning a group of paintings in Calcutta between 1777 and 1783, now referred to the ‘Impey Album’, which is considered to be one of the finest sets of natural history illustrations made for the British in India. For an illustration of a stork-billed kingfisher from the Impey series, see lot 163 in the present sale.

The present painting depicts a lady with her arms around two attendants, slowly making her way across a palace terrace towards her bedchamber, on a moonlit night. They are accompanied by musicians and one of the attendants is carrying a wine flask. The painting illustrates a popular scene among Mughal artists in the seventeenth century. A painting from the second quarter of the seventeenth century in the Victoria and Albert Museum depicts the Mughal prince Murad Baksh awaiting a similarly escorted lady (Archer 1960, pl.46), whilst a similar scene of a slightly later date is in the National Museum, New Delhi (Goswamy 1986, no.67). Another closely comparable painting dated to circa 1650-60 is published in Falk and Digby, 1979, no. 31. This iconography continued with Mughal and Provincial Mughal artists into the next century. For other similar terrace scenes dating to the mid-eighteenth century, see Ray 2008, no.61; Hurel 2010, no.160, p.126; and a late eighteenth-century painting in Poster 1994, no.55, pp.99-100.

A further painting from the same album as the present lot is in the Chester Beatty Library. Attributed to the Lucknow artist Mihr Chand and dated to circa 1770, it depicts a kneeling figure of the Sufi saint Khwaja Muin al-Din Chisti under a scalloped archway. The portrait is on an album page with blue floral borders, similar wide gold-flecked margins and inscriptive cartouche in the upper margin (acc. no.34.12, published in Markel and Gude 2010, p.79, no.10).

The calligraphic panel on the reverse of the album page contains Persian quatrains, two of which are benedictions to a king. The panel is signed by Muhammad Amin Mashhadi, an Iranian calligrapher. Active in the mid-seventeenth century, Mashhadi is best known as the scribe of the Padshahnameh manuscript in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, in 1067 AH/1656 AD (see Beach and Koch 1997, p.158).