λ FOUR INDIAN IVORY MINIATURES WITH FEMALE PORTRAITS
Delhi, Madras and Patna, India, 19th century

λ FOUR INDIAN IVORY MINIATURES WITH FEMALE PORTRAITS
PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE LONDON COLLECTOR
Delhi, Madras and Patna, India, 19th century

Comprising a profile portrait of an elegant Western woman, dressed with lavish Indian garments according to the local high-class fashion, the fair skin, the blue eyes and the light hair colour betraying her foreign origin, her Indian jewellery normally associated with weddings, possibly hinting at the miniature as a wedding gift, set within an oval glazed copper medallion and backed in brown velvet, 9.5cm x 6.5cm; a three-quarter view of a curly dark-haired woman depicted in a palatial interior overlooking the sea, a ship in the distance possibly hinting at the location, a harbour city, or linking the subject or commissioner to trade and the East India Company, set within a brown velvet lined, glazed black leather box, 9.5cm x 8cm; and two oval portrait miniatures with motherly scenes, an Indian mother feeding her child sitting on a Western-inspired chair, mounted, glazed and framed, 12.8cm x 11.8cm including the frame, and an unframed miniature with a dark-skinned Indian woman holding in her arms a fair-skinned and blue-eyed child, signed M.I., the back inscribed in French Madras and Indienne, 6cm x 5cm.

A companion watercolour of the miniature of the curly dark-haired woman, attributed to the artist Shiva Daya Lal, painted in Patna around 1850 ca., is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. no. IS.101-1949). The watercolour shows clear influences from 19th-century British illustrations and the subject works as the stock motif of an idealised female type repeatedly reproduced across India in the 19th century.

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