AN IMAGINARY CARNATION
Lot 53

AN IMAGINARY CARNATION

AURANGABAD, NORTH DECCAN, VS 1726 / 1669 AD

Closed19 June 2019

Price Realised

USD 200,000

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AN IMAGINARY CARNATION
AURANGABAD, NORTH DECCAN, VS 1726 / 1669 AD
From a Siddantha-sara, Siddantha-bodha and Aporaksha-siddantha of Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur (r.1629-1678 AD), opaque pigments on a pounced gold ground, the reverse with 15ll. black and red devanagari written by Vyasa Madhava, gold illuminated margins
Folio 7 7/8 x 4 ¾ ins. (20 x 12.1 cm.)

Probably Shuja' al-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, Lucknow (1731-75, r.1754-75)
Either John Dent or his brother William, Bengal, by 1796; thence by descent to
Sir Robert Annesley Wilkinson Dent, C.B. (1895-1983), sold Sotheby's, London, 11 April 1972, lot 106
Sven Gahlin Collection, sold Sotheby’s, London, 6 October 2015, lot 45

Specialist note

This painting was previously attributed to Haidar Ali and Ibrahim Khan, two artists working at the court of Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah of Bijapur (r.1627-56), on grounds of the quality and also the pricking of the gold ground (Zebrowski 1983, p.133, nos.100-101, pp.132-3). The script on the reverse and the decoration on the margin clearly show it to have come from the same volume as the previous lot. Please see the note to that lot for further information.
This painting was formerly in the Dent Collection, an exceptional group of approximately 150 paintings and drawings of Persian, Mughal and Deccani paintings, probably assembled in Bengal in the later eighteenth century, by either John Dent, a lieutenant in the Bengal Infantry from 1782 to 1792, or by his brother William, who was at Patna, Buxar and Tamluk from 1776 to 1796. A large number of works in the collection had inscriptions indicating that they had formerly been in the collections of Shuja' al-Daula, Nawab of Oudh (1731-75).