Add Or 2551-2552

Add.Or.2551-2552

Two paintings of occupations and costume in the Punjab and Kashmir.

By Amritsar artists, 1866.

Purchased 21 February 1969.

Note: These two paintings - the first by Kapur Singh, the second by an unknown painter - were taken from an album of Punjabi costumes and occupations commissioned by Augustus W. Honner of the 1st Grenadiers, Bombay. The album was clearly sent home to relations in England and comments by Honner were written on the paintings and in the album. His remarks are revealing both of himself and of Indian artists. He wrote, ‘I have not succeeded in engaging a good painter. I can get nothing done for me while I move about the Country as natives distrust all the English’. On a painting of ‘Women grubbing grass’ he wrote, ‘This a regular mess! The plain should be perfectly bare with a tuft here & there! & the bundle going home should be 8 times as large, as that much would not feed a goat. The trees are an idea of the artist’s & not to be seen in India’. On a picture of ‘Boys playing’, he wrote,’Another mess! - The boys holding their tails are running up from bathing & dressing as they come’. ‘These horrible pictures are the result of an order by me to paint Jyepoor Costumes’. ‘Those he painted from his own idea are generally very good & correct, but any done to order are failures’. ‘Painted to my order. i.e. I gave the subject I wanted the man to do’. For drawings from this album, see Maggs Bros., ‘Oriental miniatures and illumination, Bulletin no.10’ (London, 1966), nos. 93-105.

Kapur Singh became well known among the British in the Punjab. Percy Brown in his ‘Indian painting’ (Calcutta, 1917), 56, notes that ‘In the Punjab, at Lahore and Amritsar, the productions of several Sikh painters found favour at the end of the nineteenth century, their work having a strange mixture of the East and West. One, Kapur Singh, painted a large number of figure subjects, miniature in size, and showing a very fair knowledge of drawing with considerable action’. Two pictures by Kapur Singh were reproduced by Vincent Smith, ‘A History of fine art in India and Ceylon’ (Oxford, 1911), figs 223, 224. Kapur Singh retained many idioms, especially in his landscape backgrounds, deriving from Punjab Hills painting.