Rare Drawing / Watercolour of Maharao Ram Singh of Kota and His Sons

Epoque: 1700-1900

Medium: Pencil, pencil & ink, Watercolour

Dimension: 49 x 71 cm (19¹/₄ x 28⁰/₁ inches)

Provenance: Ex Private English collection, 1960’s to 2020
Ex Private collection

Literature: Maharao Ram Singh II of Kota 1827 - 66 is depicted hunting tigers, in the company of a young man who must presumably be his son Maharajkumar Bhim Singh, the future Maharao Shatru Sal II, 1886 - 89. The two are in an ‘odi’ shooting-box, along with three other men who are preparing their guns for them. Five magnificent tigers stride or run through the undergrowth. These are fully drawn and painted, while the other figures and the landscape are sketched in briefly. As always with Kota drawings, one admires the splendid sure line which the tigers and the main trees are sketched in, even though this is a working drawing and ‘pentimento’ is visible.
     The presence of Rajkumar Bhim Singh, who looks as he does in a drawing published by Bautze, fig. 2, allows a dating of the painting in the last decade of Ram Singh’s life. Bhim Singh was born 1839 - 40, and his small moustache and growing sideburns indicate an age of at least sixteen.
     Finished paintings of Ram Singh hunting tiger are rare, although other drawings do exist: Christie’s, London, 12 June 2018, lot 69, and Philadelphia Museum of Art (Cameron, pl. 20). A drawing of Chattar Sal shooting tiger is in the Mittal Museum in Hyderabad (Topsfield, no. 115). 
  
REFERENCES:
Bautze, J., ‘Portraits of Maharao Shatru Sal of Kota’ in Srivastava, V.S., and
Gupta, M.L., eds., Roopankan: Recent Studies in Indian Pictorial Heritage,
Jaipur, 1995, pp. 84 - 91
Cameron, A. M., Drawn from Courtly India: The Conley Harris and Howard
Truelove Collection, Philadelphia and New Haven, 2015
Topsfield, A., and Mittal, J., Rajasthani Drawings in the Jagdish and Kamla
Mittal Museum of Indian Art, Hyderabad, 2015