Hwamei on Terminalia Branch

'Hwamei on Terminalia Branch' dated by inscription 1780 is the work of the artist Shaikh Zain al-Din who was active between 1777 and 1783. It is catalogued as opaque colours and ink on paper and is now held in the Asian Art department of the Minneapolis Institute of Art as a gift of Elizabeth and Willard Clark. The sheet belongs to a series commissioned by Lady Mary Impey at Calcutta, where her husband Sir Elijah served as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and where the couple kept an aviary and menagerie they wished to see recorded with a precision that no cabinet of stuffed skins could offer. Over some six years the household gathered more than three hundred such studies of birds animals and plants from painters who had come from Patna carrying the discipline of the Mughal workshop with them. Zain al-Din is remembered as the foremost among them yet almost nothing survives of his life beyond what he wrote on his own sheets. That scarcity gives the inscriptions in the lower left corner unusual weight. In English they read "Waumee from China" and "In the collection of Lady Impey at Calcutta" while a fine Persian hand records his name followed by the words "Native of Patna" and the date. A further Persian line beneath the bird's name appears to name the subject again in the language of his own education. The sheet therefore speaks in two tongues and two worlds at once. The materials explain much of the image's temperament. Zain al-Din worked in opaque watercolour laid in thin successive layers with fine brushes on English paper of the kind shipped out to Calcutta for such commissions. Ink carries the writing and the finer contours. Nothing here is loose or wet in the manner of a European wash. The colour is dense and matte and built up the way a Mughal miniaturist builds a jewel. The bird perches on a diagonal branch at the centre of a tall cream sheet framed by fine ruled borders. Its body is a rich rufous brown feathered stroke by stroke down the folded wing and into the long dark tail while the pale legs grip the wood with visible tension. Around the eye runs the white spectacle that gives the species its Chinese name meaning painted eyebrow and it extends backward as a slender stripe as if drawn by a calligrapher. The beak is parted and the head lifted toward the upper right so that the creature seems caught mid phrase. Around it the leaves lie as broad oval planes of cool green each with its veins gently pressed in and slender beaded spikes of tiny flowers trail from the stems. There is no ground no sky and no horizon. The lower end of the branch stops in a pale clean cut as though the whole twig had been severed and carried to the artist's table. Two traditions meet in that emptiness. The absence of landscape belongs to the European natural history illustration that the Impeys knew from printed books where a specimen floats free of habitat so that its features may be read and compared. The intensity of looking belongs to the Mughal tradition that prized the individual living creature and its temperament and Zain al-Din is believed to have painted from life. The bird adds a further layer. The hwamei is native to central and southern China where it has long been kept as a caged songbird for the male's voice so its presence in a Calcutta household implies a web of trade and gift that moved living creatures across the seas. The spelling Waumee reads as an English ear's attempt at a Chinese word heard aloud. The plant carries the museum's modern title of a Terminalia branch and belongs to a tropical genus of trees. After Sir Elijah's death the collection was sold in 1810 and scattered and this sheet eventually passed into the Clark collection and then to Minneapolis. Philosophically the sheet holds an argument it never states. The Impeys sought order. To name and measure and possess the living world of a land newly under Company rule was an Enlightenment ambition and the words "In the collection of" turn a living voice into a holding. Yet the painter would not let the creature become inventory. The lifted head and open beak assert a life that no catalogue can file. The exile of a Chinese singer on an Indian branch becomes a quiet image of displacement that reaches the artist as well since he signs himself a native of Patna in a city and household that were not his own. The craft learned in a Mughal workshop here serves a judge's wife and survives by translating itself. What remains is a bird still singing on a branch cut from its tree and a Persian signature that has outlasted nearly every other trace of the man who wrote it.