Add Or 5474

Miniature portrait on ivory of Mordaunt Ricketts, Resident at the Court of Lucknow 1822-30. Ricketts is the dark blue uniform of the political service, while suspended by a broad ribbon round his neck is a large miniature portrait of Nasir al-Din, Nawab and King of Oudh 1827-37, with a smaller one above, surrounded by diamonds. A similar pair of portraits of the monarch is found in the Ricketts box album in the Khalili collection (see below). Plain background with a more distant pillar.

By a Lucknow artist, 1827-30.

Water-colour and body-colour, heightened with varnish, on ivory: 99 by 90 mm.

Purchased 2002.

Note: Born in London 5 June 1786, Ricketts was employed with the Bengal Civil Service from 1802 to 1830. He rose through a succession of minor appointments in Calcutta and Bengal to become Deputy Collector at Furruckabad (1811-13), Collector at Shahjahanpur (1813-16), and Collector at Gorrackpur (1816-18). He then moved into the Political Service and was Agent to the Governor-General at Murshidabad (1818-19), Agent to the Governor-General, Bundelkand (1819-22), and then Resident at Lucknow from 7 December 1822 until he took retirement, under something of a cloud owing to exceeding his authority on financial matters, on 1 May 1830. He married twice, firstly Maria Elizabeth Crommelin on 5 July 1811 at Kedgeree, and then Charlotte Elizabeth Ravenscroft on 1 November 1824 at Lucknow.

For other portrait miniatures on ivory in a box album from the Ricketts collections, see Linda Leach, ‘Paintings from India: the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. VII’, Oxford, 1998, pp. 198-200. This portrait was almost certainly from the same family box album. Ghazi al-Din’s court painter Robert Home retired after the death of his royal patron in 1827, and was succeeded briefly by James Lock, who died the following year. A pair of portraits in oils of Ghazi al-Din and his son Nasir al-Din, one of them signed by Muhammad A'zam, appeared on the New York and London art markets in the 1990s, which may be the origins of the miniature portraits worn by Ricketts. See The Art of Courtly Lucknow exhibition catalogue 2010, nos. 2 and 36.