Arts of the Islamic World & India including Fine Rugs and Carpets
Arts of the Islamic World & India including Fine Rugs and Carpets
SULTAN ABDALLAH QUTB SHAH OF GOLCONDA, INDIA, DECCAN, GOLCONDA, LATE 17TH CENTURY
Auction Closed
October 27, 04:55 PM GMT
Estimate
30,000 - 50,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
SULTAN ABDALLAH QUTB SHAH OF GOLCONDA, INDIA, DECCAN, GOLCONDA, LATE 17TH CENTURY
gouache with gold on paper, wide cream borders decorated with gold flowers and birds and lightly sprinkled with silver, numbered in ink the upper inner border in Persian "88" and in pencil in a European hand "14", old cyrillic ownership stamp in lower border, further numbers in lower border "871", "25", "14"; verso with four lines of bold nasta'liq calligraphy written diagonally on gold-stencilled paper, signed by Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad at Mashhad and dated 1064/1653, wide borders of cream paper decorated with insects and birds in gold and lightly sprinkled with silver, numbered in ink in upper inner border "87" and in pencil in a European hand "15", Cyrillic ownership stamp in lower border, further numbers in lower border "25", "15"
Miniature: 16.3 by 7cm.
Folio: 35 by 22.7cm.
Mamed Kerimov, Caucasus or Russia, late 19th/early 20th century (based on cyrillic ownership stamps).
Private Collection, Greece, until 2018.
Losty 2019, cat.7.
This portrait of Abdullah Qutb Shah (r.1626-72) is one of a number of single-figure portraits of the Golconda sultan painted during and after his lifetime. The present work is very similar to a portrait in the Musée Guimet, Paris (MA5026, see Haidar and Sardar 2015, cat.131, p.239), in which the figure is in an identical pose and wearing similar robes. Other portraits of Abdullah Qutb Shah include works in the Cleveland Museum of Art (2013.287, see Quintanilla et al 2016, fig.4.90, p.242), where the same style of turban is found; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, (1960.203); the National Museum, New Delhi (61.1004); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS 18-1980, see Zebrowski 1983, fig.150, p.184); the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UEA 764), and the former Ehrenfeld Collection (Zebrowski 1983, fig.151, p.184). Skelton comments that many such depictions of rulers were produced for portrait albums in the Deccan in the late seventeenth century (Skelton in Hooper 1997).
Abdullah Qutb Shah was born in 1614 and came to the throne at the age of twelve in 1626. In 1630 the Mughal armies of Shah Jahan invaded the Deccan and in 1635 Abdullah Qutb Shah was forced to sign an unfavourable treaty which increased Golconda's tribute to the Mughals, supressed the predominantly Shi'a doctrine of the Deccan in favour of official Mughal Sunnism and imposed a Mughal commissioner on the Qutb Shahi state. Abdullah was nevertheless able to expand Qutb Shahi territory in the south. He was a cultured and sophisticated monarch under whose rule architecture and the arts flourished, although with increasingly strong Mughal influence as the century wore on.
The nasta'liq calligraphy on the reverse is signed by Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad at Mashhad and dated 1064 AH/1653-55 AD. It also mentions Aqa Nasira, a possible patron.