A DOMED PAVILION BY THE RIVER
Possibly Lucknow or Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India, 1814 - 1815

Opaque pigments, ink and pencil on paper, the horizontal composition depicting a two-tiered domed pavilion by the river, possibly the Kudiya Ghat in the Gomti river in Lucknow, accessible via a brick bridge with several horseshoe arches, distant hills with shrubs and trees in the background, the foreground occupied on the left by a large tree bending forwards, next to it a group of locals in conversation on the river bank, a male character with a sword and shield squatting in the grass and pointing to the right, the view set within black borders, pasted onto laid paper with a watermark J. Whatman, 1794, marked in sepia ink no. 44, 20cm x 31.8cm the view, 25cm x 39.5cm including the laid paper.

Views similar to this, with watercolour washes and naturalistic compositions characterised by figural elongation, have often been attributed to the work of the Calcutta artist Sita Ram (J. P. Losty, 'Sita Ram', in Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, edited by W. Dalrymple, The Wallace Collection, 2019, pp. 173 - 174). Many of Sita Ram's paintings are landscapes, making him the first Indian artist that invented a free landscape style, a category of painting hitherto almost unknown in Indian art. Indeed, Sita Ram used to incorporate into his paintings a European perception of the ground receding away from the viewer to the horizon in aerial perspective, all done with soft and loose brushwork (ibidem, p. 175). In Sita Ram's compositions, monuments become subjects of picturesque paintings with a topographical quality.