This large and impressive illustration is of an immature or a juvenile Spot-Billed or Grey Pelican (Pelecanus philippensis) with its distinctive bill and pouch. Depicted here with a greyish head and neck, a darker crown and tufted crest, the pelican has a brown mantle and wing-coverts, dark brown flight feathers and brown streaking on its underwing-coverts. Widespread in the Indian sub-continent, these water birds are found around lakes, reservoirs, coastal lagoons and estuaries (Grimmett et al 1998, pp.200-1, 571).

The present painting was commissioned by Mary Reade, Lady Impey (1749-1818), the wife of Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Bengal from 1774-82. Sir Elijah and Lady Impey arrived in Calcutta in 1774. Lady Impey soon developed a keen interest in the local flora and fauna and established a private menagerie and aviary at the Impey estate in Calcutta. Three Indian artists from Patna were employed to paint the birds, animals and various plants, the senior among them a Muslim artist called Shaykh Zayn al-Din. Bhawani Das and Ram Das, two Hindu artists, joined Zayn al-Din two or three years later. The artists were trained in the Mughal style of Indian painting and were able to adapt their skills at precision and naturalism to the European tradition of natural history illustrations. This group of paintings commissioned by Sir Elijah and Lady Impey between 1777 and 1783, now known as the ‘Impey Album’, is considered one of the finest sets of natural history illustrations made for the British in India.

Birds and animals, the main subjects of the Impey series, were illustrated on large sheets of English Whatman paper. Inscriptions in English and Persian identifying the subjects were added to almost all the paintings, some including the name of the artist and a date, as in the present lot.

Shaykh Zayn al-Din was Lady Impey’s chief artist and started working for her in 1777. By 1779-80, he had moved away from depicting his bird and animal subjects on branches of trees and with the occasional narrow bands of landscape. He was now more focused on simplified compositions and mostly portraying a single subject against a plain white background. Other illustrations of single, large bids by Zayn al-Din dated to circa 1780 include a Grey Heron in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (LI901.13); the Common Crane, the Sarus Crane, and the Immature Night Heron Swallowing a Fish in The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (illus. Dalrymple 2019, cat.16-18, pp.54-56). For a listing of other large bird illustrations dated to circa 1781-82, see ibid, p.45. No dated Impey works by Shaykh Zayn al-Din are known after 1783.

The artist Ram Das, also working in the Impey studio, was a follower of Zayn al-Din. Another version of a juvenile Spot-billed Pelican by Ram Das dated to circa 1780-82 is in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (inv. no.2018.53.5; ibid., no.23, p.60).

A group of 326 watercolours was brought back to England by the Impeys in 1783 of which 197 were studies of birds, 76 of fish, 28 of reptiles, 17 of animals and 8 of flowers. After the death of Sir Elijah Impey in 1809, the collection was dispersed at a sale at Phillips, London, on 21 May 1810.

The present painting was formerly in the collection of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She travelled to India and Pakistan with her sister, Lee Radziwill, in March 1962. She was known to be fond of Indian painting, and the journalist Suzy Menkes noted in a New York Times article regarding the Sotheby’s sale of her estate in 1996: "…What a taste for the exotic! The woman who insisted on seeing the Taj Mahal by moonlight and riding an elephant with her sister, Lee Radziwill, on a trip to Pakistan was drawn to miniatures of Mogul gardens" (Published on 6 March 1996). Her interest in the artwork of the Subcontinent may have also been fuelled by her friendship with the renowned American academic, curator, teacher and collector, Stuart Cary Welch, whose legacy in the field of Indian and Middle Eastern Art reached beyond his positions as Lecturer at Harvard University and Curator at Harvard Art Museums. The Welch collection of Islamic and Indian art was sold in these rooms, 6 April and 31 May 2011. Further works from the Stuart and Edith Cary Welch Collection will be offered for sale in these rooms on 25 October 2023. These will include an early illustration from the Impey series, of a Spotted Mounia and a Purple Rumped Sunbird on flowering branches, painted by Shaykh Zayn al-Din in 1777 (lot 61).

An illustration of a large painted stork eating a snail from the Impey Album, painted by Zayn al-Din in 1781, formerly in the collection of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sold recently in these rooms, see In an Indian Garden: The Carlton Rochell Collection of Company School Paintings, 27 October 2021, lot 15.

For other illustrations from the Impey series sold at Sotheby’s London in recent years, see The Khosrovani Diba Collection, 19 October 2016, lot 21; Arts of the Islamic World, 23 October 2019, lot 204; Arts of the Islamic World and India, 27 October 2021, Lot 163; In an Indian Garden: The Carlton Rochell Collection of Company School Paintings, 27 October 2021, lots 13, 14, 16.

Further paintings from the Impey Album are in various museum collections including the British Library, Victoria and Albert Museum and Wellcome Institute, London; the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford; David Collection, Copenhagen; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; San Diego Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art.