A monumental gilt and polychrome enamelled silver huqqa, India, Lucknow, late 18th/early 19th century

Sotheby's London, 27 April 1995, lot 239.

This elaborate and monumental courtly huqqa, profusely decorated with outdoor scenes in polychrome enamels, demonstrates the artistry of the great enamellers of Lucknow in the late eighteenth century. An astounding two-thirds of the city's population are said to have been artisans in the mid-nineteenth century, a period during which Lucknow was both the wealthiest and largest city in India (S. Markel in India's Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, ed. S. Markel and T. Bindu Gude., Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010, p.199). 

The palette is the broadest of those found in Indian enamelling and includes blue, turquoise, green, aubergine, yellow and orange. The design features a wide range of fauna and flora - aquatic, on land and in the skies. Dr Manuel Keene has argued that this school of enamelling is developed from European prototypes in the early seventeenth century, probably in Hyderabad. Huqqas of this size and quality of enamelling are rare, this type of enamelling being more often seen on weapons such as a number of swords now in the Wallace Collection, London, inv. nos.1397, 1398, 1399, 1403 and 1412) but a closely comparable huqqa, now in the Indian Museum, Kolkata, inv. no.12931, is illustrated in ibid, p.209, no.83.