Add Or 735-738

Add.Or.735-738

Four portraits of Patna nobility and holy men.

Attributed to Dip Chand, Patna, c.1764.

Purchased from Miss Enid Hudson, great grand-daughter of Robert Hudson, May 1958.

Gouache with gold; blue borders.

Note: Each picture is inscribed on the reverse ‘W. F. 1764’ indicating that they were collected by the surgeon William Fullerton (d. Rosemount, Ayr, 22 October 1805) who served in Bengal and Bihar, 1744-66. He was Mayor of Calcutta in 1757, and returned to Europe from 1761 to 1763. He was appointed surgeon to the Patna Agency in 1763 and resigned in 1766. Fullerton as surgeon experienced military action and was the sole survivor of the massacre of the English at Patna in 1763 during the war with Mir Qasim of Murshidabad (Crawford (1930), 5). He must have acquired a sizeable collection of miniatures, for others with his initials appear from time to time on the market and are now in various collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum. (It is worth recording here that William Fullerton of Rosemount has in the past been confused with William Fullerton of Carstairs, another East India Company servant who died in 1805, also in Scotland.).

The painter Dip Chand evidently came from Murshidabad. Other pictures from William Fullerton’s collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum include a portrait of a European, perhaps Fullerton himself, signed by Dip Chand (I.M.33-1912, Skelton (1956), pl.11; Welch (1978A), no.1; Whitechapel (1979), no.86). Another of Dip Chand’s signed pictures is the portrait of the Armenian merchant and general Gurghin Khan (Victoria and Albert Museum D.1180-1903; Whitechapel (1979), no.87) which coincides stylistically with the present four pictures. Two other portraits from the same series as the present four are D.1181 and D.1182-1903 (Whitechapel (1979), no.88).