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3. THAKUR SAHIB ZORAWAR SINGH OF KANOTA WITH OTHER MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL OF JAIPUR India (Jaipur) circa 1900 Height: 25.3 cm Width: 31 cm |
Hand coloured photograph with painted areas. Inscribed on margin (now severed from the image) in devanagari from left to right on the bottom: babu samsar candra sainji; nanaji sahid/sri sardar simhji/phata simhji ka bhai (Thakur [baron] Sahib Zorawar Singh, brother of Fateh Singh); nanaji sahib/sri kalyan simhji and on the top: devi simhji medtya/hukkavala (Devi Singh Merta, water pipe servant). Thakur Sahib Zorawar Singh of Kanota (1826-1908) is the second seated figure from the right. According to Joachim Bautze, Zorawar Singh was born on February 25th, 1826 as the third son of Thakur Jivraj Singh of Champavat of Pilva in Marwar. His elder brothers were Abhay Singh and Shambhu Singh, and his younger brother was Fateh Singh, who is mentioned in the inscription quoted above. During the rule of Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh (reigned 1835-1880) the three younger brothers went to Jaipur, where they were given high positions in the government of the state. In 1872, Zorawar Singh received the jagir (here: a piece of land granted in perpetuity) of Kanota, which is situated eight miles to the east of Jaipur. It comprised seven villagers and provided the ruler of Jaipur with cavalry. By the time this photograph was taken, he was a member of the state council under Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh (1880-1922). The Kanota House in Jaipur, partly a hotel since 1978, was built during his rule, as was the fort of Kanota. Fateh Singh, Zorawar Singh’s younger brother, became prime minister of the Jaipur state. He was give the jagir of Naila and became the thakur of that place. Thakur Sahib Zorawar Singh died at Kanota. Babu Sansar Chander Sen, the second person seated from the left, was also as member of the State Council. He was born in April 1846 and entered the service of the Jaipur state in 1866. In 1874 he was made headmaster of the Rajput Noble School and in December 1880 he became private secretary to His Highness the Maharaja, which post he held until 1st April 1901. On that date he was appointed as a member of the Foreign Department of the council. IN 1902 he published a booklet on Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh. The identity of the other persons is uncertain, but can be ascertained with the help of the unpublished painted photographs still available in the Kanota House in Jaipur. This painted photograph combines two techniques: photography and painting. The technique of overpainting photographs was not unique to India, but towards the end of the nineteenth century many Indian-run studios, or those with a predominantly Indian clientele, began producing work in which paint was heavily applied, often to such an extent that the photograph beneath was not visible. In this way the photograph was brought into the centuries-long tradition of miniature painting. At the same time, families who had been painters for generations began taking up the camera and incorporating photographs into their work. The present composition is the result of the photographer’s arrangement of his subjects; the colourful pattern of the carpet was introduced by the painter or colourist. Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh of Jaipur became the first Rajasthani “photographer prince”. He bought his first camera in 1864. Louis Rousselet, himself a photographer, talked to Sawai Ram Singh in his capital in 1899. He recorded: “The conversation then turned on photography (he [i.e. the Maharajah of Jaipur] is not only an admirer of this art, but is himself a skilled photographer), and afterwards on France…” William Howard Russel, who reported on the Prince of Wale’s tour through India in 1875/76, remarked that: “many of the Princes of India take to photography, but the Maharaja [i.e. Sawai Ram Singh] is a master in the art”. In fact, when the Prince of Wales was about to leave Jaipur on 7th February 1876, he was given “some photographs on a large scale” by the Maharaja of Jaipur. A year after the visit of the Prince of Wales, the official painter for the “Imperial Assemblage” – the Delhi Durbar of 1877 – Val Prinsep, reached Jaipur in order to paint Sawai Ram Singh for said occasion. On 10th February, Prinsep noted while stumbling through the premises of the palace at Jaipur: “ I found myself in a comfortable room, where the Maharajah spends his leisure time photographing…The window of this photographic room look over a charming garden…” The school of art at Jaipur, opened by the maharajah in 1866, caught Prinsep’s attention: “Jeypor has a school of art, and being of course much interested therein, I stopped there, and was shown over by the principal…It turned out to be a kind of general school for trades; and turning, watch making, carpentry, pottery, electrotyping, and many others are taught there. So far, no doubt, it does good, but there is also a school of drawing, and over this I should wish to cast a veil. Of all the feeble instructions here, it is the feeblest. The master is an Indian, the things turned out, so many nightmares: large copies of photographs of the Prince of Wales, Lord Northbrook, and other Governors General, with the ghastly stare such things have when done by beginners, drawings done from nature without an atom of art: in fact, a perfect artistic Bedlam. He showed us with considerable triumph some small heads copied in needlework from photographs. Poor Lord Northbrook! If only he could see himself, he would not, in his recent speech at a distribution of prizes in England have been so laudatory of Indian schools of design”. By 1888 a number of painters were working for the Jaipur court “for applying colours on photographs”. By 1870, the Jaipur painters worked in a photo realistic style – probably by copying photographs – as a full standing portrait of Sawai Ram Singh shows. Other ateliers were also producing “watercolour paintings”, which were less likely to be copied from photographs as “Pictures of kings, Princes, Queen s, mythological deities, native ladies in various costumes, avatars, buildings and other scenes of Mahabharat and Bhagwat Purans. Prices varying from Re.o-6 toi Rs.2-8 per each piece. All modern works”. Parallel to those painters who coloured photographs were artists who continued to paint in the photographic style. One of them was Mahn Lal Musavir, whose painting is now in the Ashmolean Museum, there were also several others. Both the “photographic style” as well as the technique of colouring photographs continued under Maharaja Sawat Madho Singh (1880-19220) right into the twentieth century. Although quite a number of coloured photographs were commissioned during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, only comparatively few are known to exist outside India. Provenance: The William K. Ehrenfeld Collection Published: Joachim K. Bautze, Interaction of Cultures: Indian and Western Painting 1780-1910, 1998. pp. 174-175. cat. no. 43. The notes to this catalogue entry have been copied form Bautze. Interaction of Cultures was exhibited in 1998 at: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (M. H. de Young Memorial Museum), San Francisco, California Shoemaker Galleries, Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii Cummer Museum of Art, Jacksonville Florida Published: Robert Flynn Johnson, with essays by John Falconer, Sophie Gordon and Omar Khan. Reverie and Reality: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of India from the Ehrenfeld Collection, 2003. Reverie and Reality was exhibited in 2003 at: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honour. |