Add Or 1039-1091

Add.Or.1039-1091

Fifty-three drawings from an artist’s atelier.

Formerly Album 57, nos.1-53.

Mughal, chiefly 18th century.

Note: This collection of fifty-three drawings and miniatures was presented to the Library by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton (1762-1829), when he retired from his service in India in 1815, having spent most of his later years there in Bengal. Most of the items in the collection are of an ephemeral nature in that they are unfinished, incomplete, or have later doodles added to them, and it is fair to assume that Buchanan-Hamilton did not collect them in the ordinary sense, but acquired the group at one time. The series could well have been an accumulation of drawings and scraps from an artist’s atelier, perhaps in Patna or Calcutta. On the basis of style the bulk of the items can be dated to the middle of the eighteenth century, but some are clearly earlier, notably Add.Or.1039 and 1084, which are Mughal portraits of c.1600. At another extreme Add.Or.1091 is apparently the work of a European artist.

At the time of acquisition by Buchanan-Hamilton the drawings were probably loose, though soon after the smaller ones were mounted on paper leaves on the reverse of which were written the Persian and English descriptions. The majority of these descriptions are dubious. Indeed even the writer had his doubts about their reliability as in the case of Add.Or.1061 where he writes on the back of the picture: ‘I suspect a mistake’ ... The grey paper surrounds were added after acquisition by the Library, and the manuscript numbers which are no longer in sequence referred to the folio numbers of former Album 57. In view of the interest of the series as an artist’s collection it has been kept as a single group in preference to chronological distribution throughout the catalogue.