Add Or 2550

A pair of Nuktas or Old World Comb-ducks ‘(Sarkidiornis melanotos)’ swimming on a lake with a group of Pintails ‘(Anas acuta)’ in the background.

By Fakir Chand Lal (c.1790-c.1865), a Patna artist, c.1850.

Water-colour; 7.25 by 9 ins.

Presented by Michael Archer, 30 January 1969.

Note: Obtained by W.G. Archer at Patna in 1948 from Ishwari Prasad who attributed it to Fakir Chand Lal.

The picture is a copy of a painting by Christopher Webb Smith which is now in the Newton Library (Zoology Library), Cambridge. Christopher Webb Smith was a Bengal civilian and an enthusiastic ornithologist. From his arrival in India in 1811 until his retirement in 1842 he studied and made drawings of birds. From 1825 until 1827 he was posted in Patna where he cooperated with Sir Charles D’Oyly in making illustrations for ‘The Feathered fowl of Hindoostan’ (1828) and ‘Oriental Ornithology’ (1829), Smith drawing the birds and D’Oyly supplying the landscape backgrounds. The two were old friends from the days when Smith had been posted to Gaya from 1819 to 1823. Drawings of Smith’s house at Gaya occur in D’Oyly’s sketchbook (WD 2060.ff. 73, 74). When D’Oyly founded the ‘Behar School of Athens’ in 1824, Smith was made Vice-President. Even when Smith was posted to Arrah in 1827, their cooperation continued as the town was only forty miles distant from Patna. It was during this time that they appear to have embarked on a more ambitious project of large water-colour drawings in which Smith again painted the birds and D’Oyly the landscapes. Probably because of D’Oyly’s departure on leave to South Africa in 1832 and Smith’s transfer to Calcutta in 1834, the work came to nothing and Smith’s magnificent bird-drawings remain at Cambridge, still unpublished.

It is clear that Patna painters had access to these drawings for a number of copies were constantly made by them over the years. D’Oyly was in close contact with Patna painters and Jairam Das worked at the lithographic press. Smith’s drawings, therefore, could easily have been seen by Patna painters during the period that the two bird books were being printed there. As late as 1880, Bahadur Lal II (1880-1910) was still making bird-studies which were based on drawings by D’Oyly and Smith (see Archer, 1947, pls.38-40). For further discussions of Webb Smith’s work, see Archer (1963) and A. Gordon-Brown, ‘Christopher Webb Smith: an artist at the Cape of Good Hope, 1837-1839’ (Cape Town, 1965).