Raja Jivan Ram: A Professional Indian Portrait Painter of ...Raja Jivan Ram: A Professional . Indian...

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1 Principally Mildred and W. G. Archer, Indian Painting for the British 1770-1850 (London, 1955) and Mildred Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London, 1972).

2 Ibid., p. 171.3 For these artists see in particular Yuthika Sharma, ‘In the Company of the Mughal Court: Delhi Painter

Ghulam Ali Khan’, in William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma (eds.), Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857 (New York, 2012), pp. 40-51; J. P. Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire – Manuscripts and Paintings in the British Library (London, 2012), pp. 202-34; and J. P. Losty, Delhi 360°: Mazhar Ali Khan’s View from the Lahore Gate (New Delhi, 2012).

4 William Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (London, 1844), vol. ii, pp. 285-6.5 Meerut’s greater claim to fame is that this is where the so-called Indian Mutiny broke out in 1857.

Raja Jivan Ram: A Professional Indian Portrait Painter of the Early Nineteenth CenturyJ. P. Losty

Mildred Archer’s work on Indian painting for the British in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and her catalogue in 1972 of what she called the Company drawings in the then India Office Library established a whole new area of research for scholars of Indian painting.1 For those who approached this field from a Mughal background, her brief references to the Delhi artists she knew by name, but few by any then extant works, were full of intriguing possibilities.2 Subsequent decades have seen some of their paintings discovered and published: artists such as Khairallah, Ghulam Murtaza Khan and Ghulam ‘Ali Khan are now recognized as great masters in the late Mughal tradition, while Mazhar ‘Ali Khan has been revealed as a master non-pareil of the topographical view.3 Archer also added another name: ‘A few of the Delhi artists even painted on canvas in oils. Jivan Ram was extremely versatile and could work in a number of styles and techniques. A portrait by him of Lord Combermere dated 1828, which passed through the London sale rooms in 1955, was an ambitious composition with Combermere in Indian dress posed against a colonnade through which a procession with an elephant and a British staff officer on horseback could be seen.’ This painting does not seem to have resurfaced, but it proved possible during the last twenty years to flesh out Archer’s brief mention of Jivan Ram with the acquisition of some important works for the India Office Library’s Prints and Drawings collection (now British Library Visual Arts) and to expand the known range of his accomplishments.

Jivan Ram is in fact well known from literary sources. There is a long passage in William Sleeman’s Rambles and Recollections referring to the artist in 1834: ‘Rajah Jewun Ram, an excellent portrait-painter, and a very honest and agreeable person, was lately employed to take the Emperor’s portrait. ...’. This is the penultimate Mughal Emperor Akbar II (1759-1837, ruled 1806-37). Jivan Ram of course painting in a European style put a shadow under the king’s nose, which the king’s wives took objection to. ‘The Rajah was obliged to remove from under the imperial, and certainly very noble nose, the shadow which he had thought worth all the rest of the picture. ... When the Rajah returned to Meerut, he received a visit from one of the Emperor’s sons or nephews, who wanted to see the place. ...’.4 Sleeman’s remarks serve both to show the painter’s high social status and his being domiciled in Meerut (a large garrison town some fifty miles north-east of Delhi) by 1834.5 Although the painting is not now known, a preliminary drawing survives. Along with the papers and other drawings of Godfrey Vigne, the early traveller in the Punjab and the Himalayas, it was acquired by the India Office Library in 1971 just after the Archer catalogue had been sent to press (fig. 1). This

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Raja Jivan Ram: A Professional Indian Portrait Painter of the Early Nineteenth Century

eBLJ 2015, Article 3

Fig. 1. The Mughal Emperor Akbar II. By Jivan Ram, Delhi, c.1834. Brush drawing with wash and some colour on paper. 20 by 15 cm. Inscribed in Persian above with the Emperor’s titles and below in English: Acber Shah, late King of Delhi. India, by Juan Ram. British Library, Add.Or.3167.

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brush drawing is executed in the Indian manner in a grey paint imitating shading and with touches of colour. It appears from the shape of the background to have been intended as the basis of a portrait miniature. Jivan Ram has managed to endow the elderly emperor with a weary dignity rather than the perpetually worried look of his other somewhat earlier portraits.6

With the knowledge of the Vigne drawing in the collections and a desire to expand our knowledge of this artist, when an actual oil painting by Jivan Ram appeared on the London art market in 1993, it was swiftly acquired and published in a small exhibition catalogue (fig. 2).7 The description therein forms the basis of this much expanded account of the artist. This painting is a small three-quarter length portrait in oils on canvas of Captain Robert McMullin (1786-1865), signed Jewan Ram and dated 1827. Born in Sligo, McMullin was admitted to the Bengal Native Infantry (hereafter B.N.I.) in 1808. He took part in the expedition to Mauritius in 1810 and liked it so much that he thereafter spent a lot of leave there: he seems to have met both his wives there (he married twice). Despite not being in the Bengal Engineers, from 1823 to 1831 he was employed as Divisional Engineer at Meerut, before taking leave to England and retiring in 1835.8

Jivan Ram shows McMullin standing against the background of the church and what appear to be the cantonment buildings at Meerut. The church of St John had been built in 1819 by his predecessor as engineer at Meerut, Captain George Hutchinson, on the model of St John’s church in Calcutta. The artist has here portrayed a dashing Irishman, his left hand holding his sword hilt and the right the brim of his hat, with his eyes fixed on something to the left of the viewer. He seems to have been influenced here by some of George Chinnery’s mannerisms, including that artist’s habit of silhouetting his subject against a dark sky, with strong side-lighting, and the plentiful use of vermilion for lips and cheeks and with the shadows under the sitter’s nose remarked upon by Sleeman.9 Whereas Chinnery habitually used a generous impasto, however, Jivan Ram uses thin layers of paint to emulate the totally flat finish of Indian miniatures.

Two years later in 1995 another small half-length portrait in oils presented itself, of Captain William Garden (1790-1852), again holding the hilt of his sword in his left hand (fig. 3). It is signed and dated 1827 and this time inscribed as having been executed at Delhi. Garden was admitted to the B.N.I. in 1812 and was a captain by 1828, having taken part in the Nepal War of 1814-15 and the Third Maratha War of 1817-18. He was also something of a surveyor having drawn highly commended maps of Malwa after this last campaign.10 Garden was attached to the suite of Lord Combermere (Commander-in-Chief 1825-30), when the British successfully intervened in Bharatpur in 1825-6 to restore the infant Maharaja Balwant Singh to the throne, after he was imprisoned by his usurping cousin Durjan Sal. This war brought a large number of army officers into upper India and into Jivan Ram’s ambit. Garden was next attached to the suite of Lord Amherst (Governor-General 1823-28) in his tour of the Upper Provinces in 1826-27. Amherst visited Akbar II in 1827 and it must have been on this occasion that Jivan Ram painted Garden’s portrait in Delhi. Garden retired as Quartermaster-General of the Bengal Army with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1850. Again something of Garden’s character comes through, although unlike McMullin he looks out straight at the viewer. No doubt he was a safe and reliable pair of hands in a crisis and also an attractive personality, for him to engage the attention of both Combermere and Amherst. Jivan Ram’s style on this canvas is different from the Chinneryesque portrait of McMullin (fig. 2) and here he favours a more generalized

6 E.g. two in the British Library, see Losty and Roy, op. cit., figs 150 and 155.7 J. P. Losty, Of Far Off Lands and People: Paintings from India 1783-1881, Indar Pasricha Fine Art exhibition

catalogue (London, 1993).8 Biographical details of McMullin and other East India Company servants in this paper have been taken from

their individual service records in the India Office Records.9 Chinnery was based from 1807 in Calcutta and Dacca, before his mounting debts forced him to flee first to

Serampore in 1822 and then to Macao in 1825. See Patrick Conner, George Chinnery, 1774-1852: Artist of India and the China Coast (Woodbridge, 1993).

10 R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India (Dehra Dun, 1946-58), vol. iii, p. 450.

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Fig. 2. Captain Robert McMullin. By Jivan Ram, Meerut, 1827. Oil on canvas. 62 by 41.5 cm. Signed and dated lower left Jewan Ram 1827, together with a label on the back identifying the subject and giving its descent in the family. British Library, F863.

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Fig. 3. Captain William Garden By Jivan Ram, Delhi, 1827. Oil on canvas. 36 by 31 cm. Signed and dated on front: Jeewun Ram 1827, and inscribed on the canvas on the reverse: Captain Wm. Garden Assistant Quartermaster General Bengal Army. By Jeewan Ram at Delhi 1827. British Library, F882.

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Regency style perhaps derived from Robert Home then established at Lucknow.11 These two paintings both dated 1827 are the earliest securely dated portraits in oils by Jivan

Ram to have so far come to light. Such small portraits would seem to have been Jivan Ram’s stock-in-trade during the 1820s when he was learning his craft. Army officers up-country would have their portraits painted to mark a promotion or some important event and in the absence of any British artist turned to Jivan Ram. Many such portraits must have once existed, but without inscriptions they have been lost among many other similar nineteenth-century examples. Jivan Ram’s early style, however, once it had been identified, is unmistakable: his heads are slightly too large for the body and his modelling of torsos and especially of hands is somewhat mechanical. Attributions can be made on this basis.12

None of Jivan Ram’s portraits dates before the 1820s and his earlier career can only be guessed at, but as an Indian artist he surely would have been aware of the revolution in Delhi painting wrought by the patronage of William Fraser, his brother James Baillie Fraser and James Skinner. The stiffly formal and hieratic traditional portraits of princes and nobility had been transformed into more naturalistic renderings of the human figure, while this same new style was also used for convincing portraits of those lower down the social scale.13 Interested as he must have been in European types of portrait, there was much for Jivan Ram to see already in Delhi and Meerut: the Company’s senior officials who had settled in upper India permanently such as Sir David Ochterlony and Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe had British portraits decorating their state rooms.14 Being of relatively high social status (even though the Raja title was one given by the Emperor rather than linked to any specific territory), Jivan Ram would seem to have travelled, perhaps as far as Patna if he were to see and be influenced by Chinnery’s portraits as he was in the McMullin portrait. The hospitable house in Patna of Chinnery’s pupil Sir Charles D’Oyly and his patronage of Indian artists were two of the means by which Chinnery’s style was transmitted into Indian art.15 Jivan Ram’s portrait of Garden suggests a different influence perhaps derived from artists such as Robert Home, who was established at Lucknow by 1814 as Court Painter to the Nawab (from 1819 King) of Avadh [formerly Oudh] Ghazi al-Din Haidar.

The well-known soldier artist Captain Robert Smith (1787-1853) was based in Delhi 1822-30 and certainly painted some of his topographic oils there, but he was never a portraitist, although he may have given Jivan Ram hints on oil technique. Robert Smith himself is the subject of another small portrait attributed to Jivan Ram and also acquired by the Library in 1993 (fig. 4). This must have been painted shortly after Smith’s arrival in Delhi. All the quirks associated with Jivan Ram’s signed paintings are already present and it may be one of Jivan

11 For Robert Home’s career see Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture (London, 1979), pp. 298-323. One of the most successful of the British artists in India, he ran a profitable portrait studio first in Madras 1791-95, then Calcutta 1795-1814, before being appointed court artist to the Nawab of Avadh at Lucknow in 1814. He retired to Kanpur in 1828.

12 For example, an unknown B.N.I. officer in Joachim Bautze, Indian and Western Painting: Interaction of Cultures 1780-1910 - the Ehrenfeld Collection (Alexandria, Va., 1998), no. 19, now in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2005.64.175.

13 See Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, India Revealed: The Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35 (London, 1989); also Losty and Roy, op. cit., pp. 221-8, for examples in the British Library.

14 Ochterlony was in Delhi and Meerut from 1803 until his death in 1825. An often reproduced painting in the British Library shows him smoking a hookah and watching a nautch beneath the oil portraits on his walls, see William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma (eds.), Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, no. 28. Thomas Metcalfe resided in Delhi from 1813 until his death in 1853 and filled his great house with his family possessions brought from England as well as new works of art (see Losty, Delhi 360°, pp. 10-11). See also fig. 19 below.

15 For D’Oyly’s career, see J. P. Losty, ‘A Career in Art: Sir Charles D’Oyly’, in Pauline Rohatgi and Pheroze Godrej (eds.), Under the Indian Sun: British Landscape Artists (Bombay, 1995), pp. 81-106. A visitor to Sardhana near Meerut notes some of Chinnery’s landscapes in the palace of the Begum Samru: Thomas Bacon, First Impressions and Studies from Nature in Hindostan (London, 1837), vol. ii, pp. 33-4. For the Begum Samru, see below.

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Fig. 4. Captain Robert Smith. Attributed to Jivan Ram, 1822-25. Oil on canvas. 29 by 24.5 cm. On a typewritten label on the back: This is the portrait of a Colonel Smith … British Library, F870.

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Ram’s earliest attempts at such naturalistic portraiture in oils. Robert Smith had been in the Bengal Engineers since his arrival in India in 1805 and was known widely as a skilled artist, as noticed in the 1811-12 journal of Lady Nugent, wife of Sir George Nugent the Commander-in-Chief.16 In 1822, after a period in Prince of Wales Island (Penang) and then leave, he was appointed Garrison Engineer and Executive Officer at Delhi and made his home in the main gateway of the sixteenth-century fortress the Purana Qila.17 He designed a number of buildings in India and also repaired various monuments including the Qutb Minar and the Jami’ Masjid at Delhi before he left India in 1830.18

So Jivan Ram was much patronized by the British of Meerut and Delhi on account of this ability to draw and paint in a naturalistic European manner. Such accomplishments were valued by Indian patrons also. We have seen that he was patronized by the Emperor Akbar II, while his connection with the Begum Samru of Sardhana is also well established. The Begum (1745-1836) was one of the most extraordinary and formidable characters of nineteenth-century India.19 There are various accounts of her youth and parentage, none of them reliable, except that she appears to have been a Muslim and very fair. In 1765 in Delhi she married the German mercenary soldier Walther Reinhardt (c. 1720-78) nicknamed Sombre because of his swarthy appearance (Samru supposedly being an Indian corruption of Sombre).20 On his death in 1778 she succeeded to his jagir (landholdings) at Sardhana, some fifty miles north-east of Delhi and close to Meerut, and to the command of his mercenary troops, leading them often into battle. She converted to Catholicism in 1781, under the name Johanna Nobilis. With her well-trained troops she came several times to the aid of the beleaguered Emperor Shah ‘Alam II, for which she was given the titles Zeb un-Nisa (‘Ornament of her Sex’) and Farzand-i ‘Aziza (‘Most beloved daughter’).21 At the conclusion of the Second Maratha War (1803-05), when the East India Company added Delhi and its environs to its growing empire, she was confirmed in her estates for her lifetime, after much prevarication on the British side, and thereafter lived peacefully at Sardhana and at her other houses in Meerut and Delhi, offering hospitality to all important visitors. Towards the end of her life in 1834 she built the new palace at Sardhana. In 1820 she had begun to build a huge church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and in 1834 persuaded the Vatican to make it into a cathedral with her chaplain Father Giulio Cesare Scotti as the first (and last) bishop. Her life was turned into literature as early as 1849, being the subject of a play

16 Maria Nugent, A Journal from the Year 1811 till the Year 1815 … (London, 1839), vol. i, pp. 277 and 395.17 Two of his paintings of the Purana Qila done in 1823 are in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, see

C. A. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600-1947 (London, 1991), no. 257 and fig. 24. For more information about this portrait and Robert Smith’s oil paintings, see Raymond Head, ‘Colonel Robert Smith: Artist, Architect and Engineer’, Country Life, clxix (1981), pp. 1432-4, 1524-8.

18 Eight of his watercolours and five sketchbooks packed with topographical drawings are in the British Library’s collections (WD2087-2094 and WD309-13), for which see Mildred Archer, British Drawings in the India Office Library (London, 1969), pp. 317-23, pl. 14. The sketchbooks all date from 1812-15, while the eight watercolours were done in 1814, not as Archer suggests in 1833 (she confuses the artist with another Robert Smith of the 44th Foot or East Essex Regiment). See J. P. Losty, http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2013/12/disentangling-the-robert-smithsthe-artistic-career-of-colonel-robert-smith-1787-1853-of-the-bengal-engineers-is-one-of-th.html.

19 For early published lives, see S. Noti, Das Fürstentum Sardhana: Geschichte eines deutschen Abenteurers und einer indischen Herrscherin (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1906) and B. Banerji, Begum Samru (Calcutta, 1925). A more recent study by Michael H. Fisher focuses especially on her career in the nineteenth century and relationships with her dependents, the Mughals and the British: ‘Becoming and Making “Family” in Hindustan’, in Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (Delhi, 2004), pp. 95-121. See also his pp. 115-16 for other recent studies of the Begum.

20 An alternative explanation is provided by the alias Summers under which he joined the Company’s army after the defeat of the French in India (Banerji, op. cit., p. 5).

21 This was in 1787-88, during the rebellion of the renegade Rohilla chieftain Ghulam Qadir Khan.

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in German Begum Sumro by C. A. Paul published in Vienna, while her vast wealth was fictionalized by Jules Verne in his Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum in 1879.

The Begum had offered her troops to assist the British in the siege of Bharatpur in 1826 and, despite Lord Combermere’s politely declining the offer, insisted on marching them south to Bharatpur with herself in an open howdah on an elephant at their head, lest she said everyone should think she had grown a coward in her old age.22 Lord Combermere afterwards paid her a formal visit in 1828 when he went to Meerut, where the Begum Samru kept a large establishment and preferred to live before her new palace in Sardhana was built in 1834. Captain Mundy, his A.D.C., must be referring to Jivan Ram when he writes that during this visit: ‘Her Highness afterwards protested a great friendship for his Lordship; sent him her portrait, and insisted upon a return of the compliment. The picture, a work of a native artist who resides at Meerut, and has made respectable progress in the art, was an exceeding good likeness; and my fingers always itched to transform her hookah-snake into a broom, with which adjunct the old dame would have made no bad representative of Mother Shipton’.23

This miniature painting sent to Lord Combermere must be very like one now in the Victoria & Albert Museum attributed to Jivan Ram (fig. 5).24 The Begum is portrayed half-length wrapped up in a voluminous yellow Kashmir shawl, wearing a hat with a tassel of pearls and holding her hookah snake. Behind are a cloud-filled sky and a heavy, draped blue curtain. There is a close resemblance in composition between that portrait and an earlier one presented in 1812 by the Begum on his departure to Archibald Seton, the Company’s Resident at Delhi 1806-11, which was acquired for the British Library in 1987 (fig. 6), although the artist there left the Begum starkly silhouetted against a dark ground.25 He shows the Begum wrapped in two layers of shawls and her hat to be of fur. A visitor in 1809, Mrs A. Deane, describes her as ‘a small woman, delicately formed, with beautiful hazel eyes; a nose somewhat inclined to the aquiline, a complexion very little darker than an Italian, with the finest turned hand and arm I ever saw’, while she also remarks that the Begum always wore a yellow Kashmir shawl of exquisite texture and beneath it another silk cloak.26

The correspondence between the two portraits led naturally to the identification of the artist of the earlier one too as Jivan Ram. However, no other paintings associated with Jivan Ram are this early, and a close comparison of the two portraits shows that this attribution is impossible: the technique is very different in both, even allowing for the difference between the paper and ivory support. So an alternative attribution for the Library’s portrait was recently put forward to the slightly earlier Patna and Delhi artist Lallji.27 The V&A portrait attributed to Jivan Ram must be based on the 1812 portrait in its layout and in the Begum’s appearance, which she did not allow to change for any of her later portraits. They are, however, very different in artistic effect. The heavy expressive brush strokes of the earlier portrait seem to encapsulate

22 A painting in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, seems to commemorate this march. See Linda Yorke Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library (London, 1995), no. 7.122, col. pl. 111.

23 G. C. Mundy, Pen and Pencil Sketches: Being the Journal of a Tour in India by Captain Mundy, Late Aide-De-Camp to Lord Combermere (London, 1833), vol. i, p. 375. It was presumably on this occasion that the painting referred to by Mildred Archer (above) was done. Other portraits of Combermere also hung in the Sardhana palace: Sir Evan Cotton, The Sardhana Pictures at Government House, Allahabad (Allahabad, 1934), pp. 9-13.

24 Mildred Archer, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 1992), no. 146. Her catalogue states that this portrait was presented by General Briggs in 1831 but this is an error for 1871. Several versions of this portrait are known – another very similar version is in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin: see Leach, op. cit, no. 7.120, pp. 790-91. Other versions are listed in Bautze, op. cit., p. 190, n. 33.

25 The inscription gives her age as 67 in 1812, which means she was born in 1745, which is five years earlier than her generally given year of birth. This inscription is actually the earliest recorded one to state her age exactly and seems more authoritative than other mostly later estimates which have her born around 1750-51.

26 Quoted in Banerji, op. cit., pp. 177, 180.27 See Losty and Roy, op. cit., p. 207.

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Fig. 5. The Begum Samru. Attributed to Jivan Ram, 1825-1830. Opaque pigments on paper. Oval 10.5 by 8.5 by cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, 03554 (IS).

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Fig. 6. The Begum Samru. Attributed to Lallji, 1812. Opaque pigments on ivory. Oval 8.5 by 6.5 cm. Inscribed on reverse: Her Highness the Begume Sombre Zebool Nissa 67 years 1812. Presented to Archibald Seton… 15th August 1812. British Library, Add.Or.4302.

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the determination and will-power of this powerful lady, while Jivan Ram’s version is a more delicate and conventional representation of a female ruler. Jivan Ram’s other work for this patron will be discussed below.

So Jivan Ram was already well known by both British and Indians in upper India when in 1831 Lord William Cavendish Bentinck (Governor-General of India, 1828-35) passed through on his way to meet and negotiate at Rupar on the River Sutlej with Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab (reg. 1799-1839).28 There would have been no shortage of recommendations for him as an artist to accompany the delegation, perhaps through the good offices of Lord Combermere, the outgoing Commander-in-Chief, or else the Begum Samru with whom Bentinck was on friendly terms. At Rupar, Jivan Ram was able to draw a portrait of Ranjit Singh. A lithograph after his drawing was quickly published as the frontispiece to Henry Thoby Prinsep’s Origin of the Sikh Power in 1834 (fig. 7).29 The portrait was later published in colour by T. H. Hendley in 1909 in his Indian Jewellery (fig. 8) but without information as to its source.30 Prinsep’s account of the encounter between Bentinck and Ranjit Singh describes the various meetings held over the last few days of October 1831.31 Jivan Ram must have been an observer at these occasions, sitting quietly in a corner and making his preliminary drawing as he did in 1834 of Akbar II (fig. 1). Jivan Ram has chosen to show the whole of the Maharaja’s body rather than his usual half-length, a format in which he may have been influenced by traditional Indian concepts of royal portraiture, but he still favours a naturalistic pose. The Maharaja is portrayed seated, his legs drawn up beneath him, and propped up against two bolsters. The stiff formality with which this subject would have been portrayed by one of Ranjit Singh’s own artists has been abandoned in order to convey the ease of the Maharaja’s favourite sitting position.32

Jivan Ram next seems to have been kept busy by the Begum Samru, who built a new palace at Sardhana in 1834. She wanted its reception rooms decorated with portraits, mostly newly painted for her by Jivan Ram, William Melville and George Beechey. Later accounts of the pictures in the palace describe a collection of twenty-five or so oil paintings.33 Melville and Beechey were two professional portrait painters who reached upper India in the 1830s; Beechey was then established at Lucknow as portrait painter to the Kings of Avadh, while Melville practised at Delhi and Simla. Melville especially offered competition to Jivan Ram in the market for portraits of army officers.

28 The River Sutlej served as the then frontier between India under British influence and the still independent Punjab under Ranjit Singh.

29 Another state of this lithograph is found in the Elphinstone Album in the British Library at WD4317, f. 16vd, with different lettering: Jiwan Ram at Delhi pinxt. From Mr Prinsep’s Origin of the Sikh Power &c. Medical Journal Press Fort William.

30 The Journal of Indian Art and Industry, xii:95-107 (July 1909), p. 64, col. pl. 49, fig. 324. A portrait of the Maharaja in this same pose, propped against two bolsters on a red carpet with curtain swags framing the subject, and coloured as in Hendley’s print, is attributed to a French artist Marie de Tournamine (who was the daughter-in-law of Ranjit Singh’s French General, Jean François Allard) and published in Jean-Marie Lafont’s Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Lord of the Five Rivers (New Delhi, 2002), no. 8, and p. 137. According to Lafont, this was worked up from the lithographed portrait of Ranjit Singh by Jivan Ram published in the French translation by Xavier Raymond of Prinsep’s work (Origine et progrès de la puissance des Sikhs dans le Penjab, Paris, 1836). Another version of this portrait, presumably by de Tournamine, has been exhibited in the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Museum, Amritsar. This is in landscape format, with additional curtain swags. Both diverge from the 1834 and 1836 lithographs as well as Hendley’s chromolithograph of 1909 in having Ranjit Singh’s trousered legs modestly covered by his jama or gown. So it remains unclear whether or not there was a painting by Jivan Ram serving as the basis of Hendley’s print.

31 Henry Thoby Prinsep, Origin of the Sikh Power (Calcutta, 1834), pp. 162-7.32 For traditional portraits of Ranjit Singh, see W. G. Archer, Painting of the Sikhs (London, 1966), passim.33 The paintings are described in Cotton, op. cit., quoting earlier descriptions by H. G. Keene in 1880 and A. S. Dyer

in 1894. See his pp. 13-15 for what little was then known about Melville and pp. 24-6 for Beechey. Bautze, op. cit., refers under his nos 19 and 47 to several other contemporary descriptions of the Begum and her paintings.

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Fig. 7. Maharaja Runjeet Singh from a portrait by Jewun Ram a native artist of Delhi, who accompanied the Governor-General in the interview at Roopur in 1831. Kasinath sculpsit. Lithograph by Kasinath after Jivan Ram, 1834. From H. T. Prinsep’s Origin of the Sikh Power (Calcutta, 1834), frontispiece.

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Fig. 8. Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab. Chromolithograph after Jivan Ram, 1909. From T. H. Hendley’s Indian Jewellery (Calcutta, 1909), fig. 324

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A portrait acquired by the Library in 1995 of General Sir John Withington Adams (1764-1837) by William Melville dateable to 1837 shows the essential similarity of their style (fig. 9). Had it not been for the signature on the Adams portrait, it could have been taken for a good example of a later portrait by Jivan Ram.

The major painting in the Sardhana palace was William Melville’s full length portrait of the Begum seated in her favourite pose, which hung in the place of honour in the principal reception room. It shows her seated in a chair, her feet on a footstool and a hookah snake in her hand, as in her portrait miniatures.34 Clearly the Begum’s favoured pose for portraits was fixed long before William Melville got to paint her in the 1830s.35 The Begum seated in her chair as in the Melville portrait is the subject of a drawing formerly in the Ehrenfeld Collection and now in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (fig. 10).36 It has been plausibly attributed to Jivan Ram by Joachim Bautze, who has also made a convincing case for this rather than the Melville portrait to be one of the preparatory drawings for the marble statue of the Begum on top of her funerary monument in her cathedral at Sardhana. This was carved in marble by Adamo Tadolini in 1842 and shipped eventually to Sardhana. On the top of the vast mausoleum the diminutive Begum perches in her favourite pose, seated in a chair, her feet on a footstool and smoking a hookah.37

On the Begum’s death her jagir lapsed to the East India Company, but the palace and its contents were left to her step-grandson David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre (1808-51), another famous nineteenth-century character who became a British M.P. and married a daughter of the second Earl St Vincent. His increasing eccentricities led to his being declared insane by a lunacy panel appointed by the Lord Chancellor.38 He spent the rest of his relatively short life refuting this charge. On his widow’s death in 1893 without issue, all the remaining property including the Sardhana palace and its contents were sold, on which occasion seven of the paintings were bought for Government House, Allahabad. Those that were not bought for Allahabad were mostly purchased by T. R. Wyer, who in 1913 presented eight of them to the Indian Institute, Oxford.39

34 Cotton, op. cit., frontispiece, now at Raj Bhavan, Lucknow. Another portrait of her in her chair and holding a hookah, now in a private collection, was given by the Begum to General Jean François Allard, a French officer in the service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab, on his way back to France in 1834 for presentation to King Louis Philippe (Jean-Marie and Rehana Lafont, The French & Delhi, Agra, Aligarh and Sardhana (New Delhi, 2010), no. 171). The Lafonts attribute this portrait to Jivan Ram, but the Begum’s elaborately twisted pose and nearly full-frontal face seem more genuinely European in style and it is perhaps attributable to the hand of William Melville.

35 Bautze, op. cit., pp. 188-9, explores this mistaken idea of the iconography of the Begum’s portraiture being entirely based on Melville’s work.

36 Ibid., no. 47.37 Tadolini also carved three marble relief panels for the plinth below the Begum’s statue, one of which is based on

Jivan Ram’s painting of the Begum presenting a chalice to the Bishop of Sardhana (Cotton, op. cit., fig. 7). The other two are based via now vanished drawings on two large traditional Delhi style paintings by Muhammad A’zam of the Begum in durbar in her court and of her march to Bharatpur now in Dublin (Leach, op. cit., nos.7.121-2, pp. 791-8, col. pls 109-11).

38 He is the subject of a recent life by Michael H. Fisher: The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre: Anglo-Indian Victorian M.P. and ‘Chancery’ Lunatic (London, 2010).

39 Cotton, op. cit., pp. 44-8. They were later transferred to the Bodleian Library. Only seven of them seem to be there now. Of the paintings by Jivan Ram described by nineteenth-century visitors to Sardhana, the portraits of General Cartwright, General Lawton, Bishop Scotti, Dr Thomas Drever, Louis Derridon, and Major Reghelini are at Oxford along with a previously unmentioned portrait of Jacob Rogers. The portraits at Government House, Allahabad, were transferred to Raj Bhavan, Lucknow, after 1947, including Jivan Ram’s portraits of General Allard, Lord Combermere, and a possible Sir Thomas Metcalfe, as well as the Begum Samru offering a chalice. Others of Jivan Ram’s Sardhana paintings have disappeared, including portraits of General Ventura, Father John Murray, Colonel Boileau, John Thomas, Aga Wanus, and David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre as a child and as a man. A half-length, presumably posthumous, portrait of Sir David Ochterlony (d. 1825) seated in three-quarter view attributed to Jivan Ram, now in the Victoria Memorial, Calcutta (see Lafont, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Lord of the Five Rivers, no. 55), would have been beyond Jivan Ram’s powers based on the evidence of his portraits up to 1835 and so is unlikely to have been the one once at Sardhana.

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Fig. 9. General Sir John Withington Adams, wearing his star and badge as G.C.B. and the Seringapatam Medal. By William Melville, Simla or Subathu, c.1837. Oil on canvas. 68 by 56 cm. Inscribed on reverse: W. Melville pinxt. British Library, F880.

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Fig. 10. The Begum Samru, preparatory drawing for her funerary monument. Attributed to Jivan Ram, c.1836. Brush drawing on paper. 53.3 by 41.9 cm. Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2005.64.48.

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Jivan Ram’s style is unmistakable in some of them, although most seem to have suffered over the years. Two of the better preserved ones are signed, uniquely, as by ‘Raja Jivan Ram’, the only time in his signed portraits he used this title awarded by the Emperor.40 These are portraits of Colonel Edmund Cartwright (1778-1853) of the 57th B.N.I. painted in 1834 (fig. 11) and Antonio Reghelini (b. 1784), depicted as an officer in the Begum’s service in 1835 (fig. 12). In these paintings Jivan Ram is perhaps a little more assured and confident in his handling of a larger canvas, but he still favours the flat finish of miniatures. Cartwright’s body is three-dimensional but that of Reghelini less so. Cartwright in the 1830s was one of the most senior of the Bengal Army’s officers, his career in India having begun in 1795 at the age of seventeen. In 1829 he was posted as Commandant at Delhi and then in 1833 to a similar position at Agra and Mathura, during which time he must have been drawn into the hospitable web of the Begum, who had Jivan Ram paint his portrait for her.41 Reghelini was an Italian from Vicenza who went to India as a young adventurer in 1803 and joined the Begum’s service a dozen years later. He served her continuously both as her general at the head of her army and also as her architect when she built her new palace and cathedral at Sardhana.42 She regarded him as part of her extensive family and made financial provision for him.43 He appears looking a little younger in a large durbar scene of the Begum’s court painted by the artist Muhammad A’zam around 1825 and now in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.44 Somewhat different in mood is Jivan Ram’s portrait of Bishop Giulio Cesare Scotti (fig. 13), undated but presumably painted after 1834 when, following the Begum’s gift of a lakh and a half of rupees in 1831 to the Holy See (then about £15,000), he became the first (and last) Bishop of Sardhana with the title of Bishop of Amathunta in partibus infidelium. He is wearing his cassock edged with the red piping that signifies episcopal status, but his biretta is still black when it perhaps should be red. A dramatic red curtain swag falls behind him, the first time that Jivan Ram has used this device in his oil paintings. Scotti returned to Italy after the Begum’s death and died there in 1863; the vacant post of bishop was not filled.

In addition to his oil paintings, Jivan Ram was also a painter of miniature portraits on paper, as we have seen above with the Begum Samru, and also on ivory. He would seem to be referred to as such an artist by Emily Eden in glowing terms when she was staying in 1838 at Meerut with her brother George Lord Auckland (Governor-General 1836-42), and her sister Fanny: ‘I treated myself to such a beautiful miniature of W[illiam] O[sborne, her nephew]. There is a native here, Juan Ram, who draws beautifully sometimes, and sometimes utterly fails, but his picture of William is quite perfect. Nobody can suggest an alteration, and as a work of art it is a very pretty possession. It was so admired that F[anny, her sister] got a sketch of G[eorge] on cardboard, which is also an excellent likeness’.45 None of these portraits has yet surfaced.

So Jivan Ram’s ascribed work as a miniature portraitist was still waiting rediscovery when in 1996 a most interesting portrait miniature appeared, of Captain James Manson of the B.N.I. (1791-1862) (fig. 14). While no artist was named, the style of the portraiture immediately recalled Jivan Ram. The flat modelling of the coat may be noted as well as the too narrow shoulders in relation to the size of the head; these traits are associated with Jivan Ram, who faced an

40 See Bautze, op. cit., pp. 98-9, quoting Jean-Marie Lafont, La Présence française dans le royaume Sikh du Penjab 1822-1849 (Paris, 1992), p. 316, n. 175. All the Bodleian’s paintings by Jivan Ram may be seen, along with other oil paintings by or attributed to Jivan Ram in public collections in the UK, at http://www.bbc. co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/search/painted_by/jayun-ram. Apart from those mentioned here, another portrait by Jivan Ram of Captain John Fisher (1802-46) is in the Gurkha Museum, Winchester.

41 For her renowned hospitality see Fisher, ‘Becoming and Making “Family” in Hindustan’, p. 105. 42 A rare set of lithographed plans and elevations of St Mary’s Cathedral presumably based on Reghelini’s drawings

are in the Library’s collections (P2985-88) prepared by J. H. Madge of Calcutta, undated, but with watermarked dates of 1829.

43 Fisher, ‘Becoming and Making “Family” in Hindustan’, p. 110.44 Leach, op. cit., no. 7.121, pp. 791-5, col. pls 109-11.45 Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (London, 1866), vol.

i, pp. 33-4.

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Fig. 11. Colonel Edmund Cartwright. By Raja Jivan Ram, Meerut or Sardhana, 1834. Oil on canvas. 76 by 63.5 cm. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, LP643.

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Fig. 12. Antonio Reghelini. By Raja Jivan Ram, Sardhana, 1835. Oil on canvas. 76 by 63.5 cm. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, LP645.

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Fig. 13. Bishop Giulio Cesare Scotti. Attributed to Jivan Ram, Sardhana, 1834-36. Oil on canvas. 76 by 63.5 cm. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, LP648.

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additional difficulty in the narrow space provided by this oval format. Manson from 1823 to 1828 was assistant to Captain J. D. Herbert in the geological survey of Kumaon and the mountains of Almora, and was the artist of the twelve charming views of the mountains now in the British Library that originally accompanied Herbert’s official report.46 Promotion to captain was often the occasion for commissioning a portrait, which happened to Manson in 1825. He spent much of his later career in charge of the last Maratha Peshwa, Baji Rao, at his exile at Bithur near Kanpur. He retired as a Colonel in 1857 and was promoted to Major-General in 1859.

It was not, however, until the beginning of this century that portrait miniatures reliably ascribed to Jivan Ram began to emerge. The British Library has been able to acquire four ascribed miniatures, three of them dated 1824 and one 1826, all of them in the then fashionable rectangular shape which Jivan Ram no doubt preferred to the more traditional oval, as it gave him more space for his sitter’s shoulders. In 2006 there appeared a miniature on ivory of the Bengal civil servant George William Bacon (b. 1801), ascribed to Jivan Ram on 22 June 1824 at Shahjahanabad (i.e. Delhi) (figs 15-16). On all his ascribed portrait miniatures the date is specifically spelled out in Urdu with months and years in the Christian era. Jivan Ram here adopts the classic stage setting for a portrait miniature: the subject is seated before a draped curtain and marble column. George William Bacon was a civil servant in the Bengal Presidency who arrived in India in 1819. By 1824 he was Assistant to the Superintendent of Police in the divisions of Benares and Bareilly, but it was his appointment as the Officiating Judge and Magistrate of Meerut (1826-1827) which would have brought him into Jivan Ram’s orbit (officially gazetted dates in India often seem a year or two behind what actually happened on the ground). The rectangular shape of the ivory support follows what was happening to portrait miniatures in England in the Regency period, but it proved influential in Delhi also, since both shape and composition with curtain swag and column were adopted by Ghulam ‘Ali Khan when he tried his hand at this style for his portrait on ivory of Akbar II in 1827.47

Two more rectangular ivory portraits by Jivan Ram were acquired the following year, this time of a senior army officer and his wife (figs 17-18). Both are fully inscribed as by Jivan Ram, but they do not unfortunately state the names of the sitters, although the army officer is believed to be Sir Thomas McMahon, Bt (1779-1860). McMahon moved in the Prince Regent’s circle, being brother to Sir John McMahon, the Irish-born politician who was private secretary to the Prince Regent 1811-17, and who was created a baronet just before his death in 1817. Sir John undoubtedly used his position to benefit his family: his brother Thomas inherited his baronetcy and was awarded the lucrative position of Adjutant General of the King’s forces in India. He remained for twelve years and was certainly there in this position between 1817 and 1824. McMahon returned to India later as Commander-in-Chief of the Bombay Army 1840-47. McMahon adopts the fashionable Napoleonic stance standing with one hand concealed in his coat, while behind him Jivan Ram places a wreathed pillar and a table with writing implements and his hat with feathers. Lady McMahon was Emily Anne, née Westropp, whom he married in 1808. Her portrait is dated three months later than her husband’s. She is seated with her hand resting on the arm of her chair and wearing a low-cut deep red dress and a necklace of what appear to be carnelian beads. Jivan Ram is decidedly better at painting women’s hands than men’s.

From the inscription (fig. 18) we learn that Jivan Ram was the son of one Bafalji and was a resident of Delhi, but it is poorly written with many of the dots omitted so that his father’s name is provisional. It was first read as Tulchi, but the name appears more clearly on another inscription below (fig. 20). The place where the miniature was painted is also poorly written, but perhaps is meant to be the Cantonment at Meerut. Technically, however, all three of these 1824 portraits leave something to be desired. Instead of the watercolour traditionally used for portrait miniatures on ivory, Jivan Ram seems to be using heavy bodycolour or gouache, used

46 For the drawings by Manson that originally accompanied Herbert’s official report (MSS Eur. E96), see WD543/ff. 1-11, described in Archer 1969, pp. 558-9, pls 102-3.

47 Losty and Roy, op. cit., fig. 154.

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Fig. 14. Captain James Manson. Attributed to Jivan Ram, c.1825. Gouache on ivory. Oval 7.2 by 5.8 cm. Inscribed on the reverse: ‘My grandfather General James Manson …’ British Library, Add.Or.5226.

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Fig. 15. George William Bacon, Bengal Civil Service. By Jivan Ram, Delhi, 1824. Gouache on ivory. 17.7 by 13.4 cm. British Library, Add.Or.5605.

Fig. 16 (reverse of fig. 15). Translation of the Urdu inscription on the backing sheet: ‘1824 of the Christian year, this portrait [is the] work of Jivan Ram, done on the twenty-second of June, at the place Shahjahanabad [and in a different hand] Mr George William Bacon’. British Library, Add.Or.5605, verso.

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Fig. 17. Sir Thomas McMahon, Bt, and Lady McMahon. By Jivan Ram, perhaps at Meerut, dated 10 January 1824 and 9 March 1824. Gouache on ivory. Each 16 by 11.5 cm. British Library, Add.Or.5636 and 5637.

Fig. 18 (reverse of fig. 17, left). Translation of the Urdu inscription on the backing sheet: ‘This picture [is the] work of Jivan Ram son of Bafalji resident of Shahjahanabad done on the tenth of January the Christian year 1824 the place Kant? Marthir?’ [obscure, possibly Kant. Mirath, or Meerut Cantonment, is meant]. British Library, Add.Or.5636, verso.

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by many Indian artists at this time for works on paper, so that the sparkle imparted by the ivory support shining through the watercolour pigments is missing.

Yet another ascribed portrait dated 1824 appeared in 2010 and is now in a private collection in the USA (figs 19-20). The subject is an unnamed officer wearing the blue coat normally associated with the Company’s political service. Since the painting was done at Agra where no Residency was based, he like the artist was presumably visiting from elsewhere. This is a most sensitive portrait of an obviously intelligent, serious young man with his curly hair going thin on top, thin pursed lips and a remarkably long nose. It is a better example technically perhaps because Jivan Ram seems more in control of his pigments, while the composition is simpler with strong side-lighting that silhouettes the head against a light background in the traditional manner of portrait miniatures. The sitter bears a considerable resemblance to another of the oil portraits by Jivan Ram once in the Begum Samru’s palace at Sardhana that Evan Cotton and others have argued is of Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe (1795-1853) of the Bengal Civil Service.48 Metcalfe lived and worked at Delhi as assistant to the Residents from 1813 (in the first instance to his brother Sir Charles) and then as Agent and Commissioner himself, as the post had become, from 1835 until his death in 1853. Given the range of Begum Samru’s acquaintance and her habit of ordering pictures in the 1830s, there is every reason to believe that she would have had one of Thomas Metcalfe after his appointment at Delhi in 1835. His daughter Emily (1830-1911) has left a good description of him around 1850: ‘He was not a tall man, I should think about 5 ft. 8 inches, but well made, with beautifully small hands and feet. His hair was grey, but he was bald on top of his head; his eyes were blue, a straight nose, well-formed mouth, with often a whimsical expression on it, but he retained a good many smallpox marks from his boyhood …’.49 This matches almost exactly our portrait, given the difference of twenty-five years, save for the smallpox marks, which an Indian artist might be forgiven for not including: few in fact did, despite the prevalence of the disease in India. The blue coat that our man is wearing is more normally associated with military officers in undress uniform working in the Political Service, but it was sometimes worn by non-military Residents such as Mordaunt Ricketts, the Resident at Lucknow 1820-30.50 Most of Metcalfe’s possessions and portraits were destroyed in 1857 when his house was ransacked, so portraits of him are almost non-existent.

Another miniature signed by Jivan Ram and dated 1826 has just been acquired by the Library, of Lieutenant Gervase Pennington (1795-1835), dressed in the uniform of the 3rd Bengal Horse Artillery (fig. 21). This is a standing three-quarter length and more ambitious portrait, set in an interior with a view to a landscape outside through arched embrasures. Pennington adopts a military swagger pose with one hand on his hip, the other on his sword, while his crested helmet is beside him. Pennington was Adjutant to the 3rd Brigade Bengal Horse Artillery from 1825 to 1832. Again we note the disproportion between head and body usual in Jivan Ram’s portraits. Pennington along with his regiment was involved in the Bharatpur war in 1825-26, which would have brought him into Jivan Ram’s ambit. The inscription gives the artist’s name and date in the usual formula in Urdu and then adds for the first time his name as Jewun Ram that is also found on his 1827 portraits in oils.51

48 Cotton, op. cit., pl. 4, pp. 24-8. The portrait was labelled as one of Sir Charles Metcalfe, to whom it bears no resemblance whatsoever. Portraits of the two brothers were often confused although there was little resemblance. A portrait of Charles in the Metcalfe Collection in the British Library WD3741 was thought by their descendants to be of Thomas. Cotton compared the picture with a photograph of a miniature of Metcalfe done in 1826 owned by Metcalfe’s granddaughter Lady Chapman: ‘An evident similarity can be traced between the young man of the miniature and the elder man of the Begum’s picture: there is the same nose of unusual length, and the eyes have much in common’ (pp. 21-2). This miniature, of which the provenance is unfortunately lost, is clearly dated 1824 in the Urdu inscription but if this is the same miniature, Cotton might possibly have mistaken the 4 and 6.

49 Quoted in P. Spear, ‘Twilight of the Mughals: Studies in Late Mughul Delhi’, in The Delhi Omnibus (New Delhi, 2002), p. 158.

50 Illustrated in Zoe Yalland, Traders and Nabobs: The British in Cawnpore, 1765-1857 (Salisbury, 1987), p. 138. See also Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library, pl. 56, two Britons dining c. 1830 with Nasir al-Din Shah of Avadh, both of whom are wearing similar coats and one of whom must be Ricketts.

51 The form Jewan Ram is also found on another portrait miniature done in 1826 of a seated military officer supposed to be Sir Thomas Ramsay of Balmain that passed through the London art market in 2012.

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Fig. 19. Portrait of an East India Company man, perhaps Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe. By Jivan Ram, Agra, 1824. Gouache on ivory. 9.5 by 6.5 cm. Kenneth and Joyce Robbins collection, image courtesy Brendan Lynch and Oliver Forge.

Fig. 20 (reverse of fig. 19). Translation of the Urdu inscription on the backing sheet: ‘This picture [is the] work of Jivan Ram son of Bafalji resident of Shahjahanabad dated month February year 1824 the place Akbarabad.’ Kenneth and Joyce Robbins collection, image courtesy Brendan Lynch and Oliver Forge.

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Fig. 21. Lieutenant Gervase Pennington, 3rd Bengal Horse Artillery. By Jivan Ram, Meerut or Delhi, 1826. Gouache on ivory. 16 by 11.5 cm. Translation of the Urdu inscription on the backing sheet: ‘The work of Jivan Ram twenty-seventh February the Christian year 1826’; also Jewun Rum. British Library, Add.Or.5726.

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So we learn from these portraits and written descriptions that Jivan Ram was the son of Bafalji and in the early 1820s was a resident of Delhi, but was prepared to travel to Agra and perhaps to Meerut for commissions. His name was widely known among officers in upper India who wanted small portraits painted no doubt to send to families at home, and he must have had an exceptionally busy time at the conclusion of the Bharatpur war in 1826. By 1827 he had established himself at Meerut when he came into the orbit of the Begum Samru, for whom he painted a large number of portraits for her palace in the 1830s. He was sufficiently well known as a portrait painter to have been invited to Rupar to draw Ranjit Singh in 1831 and to have painted the Emperor Akbar II in 1834, though the commissioner of this portrait is unknown. The latest date on the paintings associated with the Sardhana court is 1835 and the Begum was dead the following year. He was certainly still working in 1838-39 as a miniature painter when Emily Eden met him at Meerut. He had perhaps given up painting military portraits by then in the face of competition from William Melville. His definite work dates between 1824 and 1836, extended to 1838-39 through references. Whether Jivan Ram continued to flourish in the next decades we do not know for certain. His name has been linked to a portrait of Lieutenant and Adjutant William Munro (1818-80) of the 39th Foot or Dorset Regiment done in 1844 and now in the National Army Museum.52 Here the treatment of the uniform coat over his torso and of his hands, as well as the overlarge head, are certainly traits associated with Jivan Ram’s work, but the treatment of the shoulder scales, cap badge and other decorative items seems superior to anything he did previously and it is more likely to be the work of William Melville. So the jury is out on this one until more of the artist’s securely ascribed later work surfaces.

The demise of regular imperial patronage in the nineteenth century allowed artists such as Ghulam ‘Ali Khan to offer his services to many different patrons including of course to the two last Emperors.53 Jivan Ram pursued a different course and preferred on the whole for his British sitters to come to him in Delhi or Meerut. He was of sufficient social standing not to have needed to pursue this career, but did so presumably because of his love of art. Such attitudes embracing the best of what Europe had to offer typified early nineteenth-century Delhi society. Yet attitudes changed and entrenched positions hardened, so that after the uprising of 1857 Jivan Ram’s work was forgotten, even among Indians who later lauded Raja Ravi Varma for pursuing the same course of adapting the European realistic tradition to Indian portraiture.

The acquisition of these paintings and miniatures by the British Library and their publication here is a first attempt at outlining the whole of Jivan Ram’s career. Not until more signed and dated work appears will it be possible to provide a definitive account of one of the most interesting Indian artists of the nineteenth century. Jivan Ram boldly essayed the techniques and style of European portraits and set himself up as a portrait painter without a patron. He is not of course among the greatest of Indian artists, even in the nineteenth century; his ambition was greater than his talents or technical ability were able to convey. Yet they are mostly undeniably charming examples of the art of portraiture. He is able in his best works to capture something of the spirit of the sitters: the bold Irishman McMullin capturing the hearts of two brides from Mauritius, for example, or the handsome and quietly competent Garden who was so often commended by his superiors. His paintings on ivory are less satisfactory, apart perhaps from the putative portrait of Metcalfe, but we have at the moment only his early works and we must wait for those over which Emily Eden enthused to reappear.

52 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/lieutenant-and-adjutant-later-general-william-munro-18181182860.

53 For a summary of his career, see Sharma, ‘In the Company of the Mughal Court’.

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