Dancers and musicians performing for a princess on a terrace before a river
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Gouache |
| Current Location: | Private Collection |
| Location History: | Commissioned in Awadh circa 1770, this folio belonged to a dispersed luxury album, possibly compiled for Nawab Shuja' al-Daula. While sister folios entered the collection of Chief Justice Sir Elijah Impey, this specific painting bypassed his repository, remaining in India until its late 19th-century acquisition by Admiral Edmund Fremantle.It later entered the prestigious Khosrovani-Diba Collection, a premier private assemblage of Indo-Persian art. The painting emerged publicly at Sotheby’s London on October 19, 2016 (Lot 18), where it was acquired by a private collector, in whose confidential possession it remains today. |
This exquisite album folio, produced in Oudh, circa 1770, captures a pivotal moment of stylistic migration and cultural syncretism in late eighteenth-century Indian courtly art. Painted by Muhammad Afzal, a master likely trained at the imperial Mughal court of Muhammad Shah in Delhi during the 1740s, the work reflects the subsequent displacement of imperial talent toward the burgeoning provincial epicenter of Lucknow. While the voluptuous treatment of the female figures and the rigid geometry of the terrace setting bear the hallmark of Afzal’s earlier, mid-century Delhi idiom recalling his celebrated portrait of a lady in the India Office Library the expansiveness and atmosphere of the distant, receding riverine landscape betray the shifting aesthetic topographies of his later Lucknow phase.True to the sophisticated composition of the period, the artist embeds his signature, 'amal-i Muhammad Afzal', with playful subtlety within the loop of the princess’s huqqah pipe. The painting is framed by distinctive, gold-flecked cream borders featuring an identifying Persian inscription within a gold cartouche reading 'tasvir majlis raqs' ("a picture of a dance gathering"). The reverse contains masterfully illuminated nasta’liq calligraphy executed by Hafiz Nurullah, a celebrated scribe who served the court of Nawab Asaf al-Dawla.Crucially, the absence of Sir Elijah Impey’s seal impression reveals that this specific folio bypassed the Chief Justice's renowned collection, descending instead through parallel, unrecorded groups of this complexly dispersed album. Suspended between imperial Mughal nostalgia and the vibrant theatricality of late Awadhi patronage, the folio stands as a brilliant testament to the fluid, cosmopolitan networks of artists, calligraphers, and European connoisseurs navigating late eighteenth-century Northern India.