Johnson 1,20

Portrait of a mufti.

By Bahadur Singh, Lucknow, c.1770.

Richard Johnson Collection. Purchased 1807.

Signed in lower left corner in Persian: ‘‘amal-i bahadur singh musavvir’ (the work of the artist Bahadur Singh).

Gouache with gold; on an album page with plain borders.

212 by 135 mm; page 505 by 350 mm.

A mufti, facing right, stands in a landscape, his hands folded within the huge sleeves of his gold-trimmed white robe, an enormous white turban on his head and a gold scarf about his neck. Beyond is a peaceful river with trees stretching into the distance on the far bank.

Note: With Mihr Chand, Bahadur Singh was a leading artist at the court of Oudh. He probably worked closely with Mihr Chand at Faizabad before 1775, and the two artists share many of the main features of each other’s styles. Here Bahadur Singh has used the devices of the blue horizon with little trees and the darker cloud areas at the very top, which are also associated with Mihr Chand’s miniatures. In Add.Or.24 he employs an illustrative style usually reserved for European patrons; it is close to that of Sital Das, but there is no evidence that he worked for Johnson at any time. After 1775 his style is adopted at Lucknow for numerous terrace scenes and subjects of romantic and religious interest, and the span of his influence suggests that he was a painter who commanded wide respect among his followers.

Note: Redated to c.1770 from c.1775, as the presence of shadows does not necessarily mean that the work post-dates Tilly Kettle’s visit to Faizabad in 1772-3. Dip Chand’s work of 1764 already includes such features. A later version of this painting dated 1787, in which the subject is named as Mir Maulana Jalal al-Din, is in the British Museum – 1920 9-17 011 (41) – as is an oval miniature of the same subject half-length (56), both from an album assembled in Lucknow 1785-88, formerly Add. MS. 5717.