A young prince in late adolescence is sitting with a falcon on his gloved left hand. His incipient moustache and beard demonstrate his youthfulness. His vertical eyelashes are particularly noticeable. His right hand holds the tassel of his sword which is resting on his lap in its crimson scabbard and protruding into the red surround. He is dressed in a white jama decorated with small red flowers in a diaper pattern and a plain white patka and turban decorated with a long white tasselled feather. A very large katar is stuck through his patka on his left side. The blue rug he is sitting on has a diaper pattern of red flowers. The background is a rich saffron.
This elegant and incisive portrait is of a format that was developed in Mankot in the late 17th - early 18th century. The seated prince occupies a large part of the picture surface, the rug is viewed in plan and fills the lower third of the surface and a coloured background fills the remainder. The inscriptions are inaccurate, so we are left to speculate.
Another portrait of our young prince was in the Heeramaneck collection (Heeramaneck 1984, pl. 103), slightly older with more beard showing, seated on a striped rug with another young prince with vases of flowers behind, against a rich saffron background like ours, and attributed to Mankot, c. 1700. Another portrait is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, again uninscribed, showing a young prince seated on a carpet and smoking from a hookah (Roy 2008, pp. 124-25), where it is dated to c. 1700 and from Mankot. He appears again in a portrait in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts {inv. 17.2760), there with an inscription 'Raja HatafBandral'. Whereas Hataf seems an unknown name, Bandral is definitely a link to the small state of Bandralta. Yet another prince, smoking a hookah and seated on a striped durrie against the same rich saffron ground, in the Chandigarh Museum, is possibly another portrait of the same young man, and this one of prime importance since it is the one inscribed sabi Meju di ('Meju's portrait'), and is attributed to The Master at the Court of Mankot possibly Meju' (Goswamy and Fischer 1992, pp. 96-125, fig. 31; Goswamy and Fischer 201 lb 'Meju', fig. 12).
What distinguishes our portrait, together with the Heeramaneck double portrait, is an incisiveness, an absolute clarity of design, in the verticals and sweeping curves of the figure's outline, in the beautiful poise of the head on the column of the neck. 'Meju' was of course the artist to whom are attributed the horizontal and vertical Mankot Bhagavata Puranas, a dispersed Ragamala, and a small number of incisive portraits, like ours.
There was an extremely close stylistic relationship between portraiture in Mankot and Bandralta and artists from both states worked in either place. That indeed is what seems to have happened in this case. Either 'Meju' or someone equally good was the artist of our Bandralta princely portrait.

Provenance

Private collection, London
Ludwig Habighorst collection

Sothebys New York, 11 January 1985, lot 426
Sotheby's London, 17 December 1969, lot 156

Exhibitions

Gotter, Herrscher, Lotosblumen. Indische Miniaturmalerei aus 4 Jahrhunderten', Kreissparkasse Westerwald, Montabaur, 2003
'Blumen, Baume, Gottergarten', Völkerkunde-Museum, Hamburg, 2013

Publications