An Ashy-Crowned Sparrow Lark (Eremopterix Grisea) perched on the branch of a Mimosa tree, from the Impey Album, Signed by Zayn Al-Din, Calcutta, dated 1780

inscriptions

In English and Persian:

'In the Collection of Lady Impey at Calcutta'

'Painted by Zayn Al-Din, Native of Patna 1780'

The animal and bird drawings produced for Lady Impey between 1777 and 1783 are among the earliest and without doubt the finest of natural history illustrations made for the British in India.  Sir Elijah Impey was appointed first Chief Justice in Bengal in 1774 following the new Regulating Act which called for the establishment of law courts in Calcutta. When Sir Elijah left for India with his wife Mary they took their household with them, including servants and a moonshee from whom Sir Elijah could learn Persian. He set about collecting manuscripts and miniatures almost immediately, having his personal Persian collector's seal cut within the year. But it was his wife, bound to the house by family duties and frequent child-bearing, who collected exotic creatures in the garden of their Calcutta home, which must have become a veritable menagerie. 

From 1777 Lady Impey employed Shaykh Zayn al-Din from Patna where, it can be assumed, he had been trained in the Mughal techniques of miniature painting. After three years Zayn al-Din was joined by two Hindu painters, Bhawani Das and Ram Das, both also from Patna. The project continued until Impey was recalled to London in 1783, by which time a total of 326 drawings, 197 of them birds, had been completed. Examples from the Impey series of natural history drawings are today in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Wellcome Institute, London, the Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford, the San Diego Museum of Art and in private collections. 

For illustrations of others of the Impey series see M. and W. G. Archer, Indian Painting for the British, Oxford, 1955, nos.6-9; T. Falk and G. Hayter, Birds in an Indian Garden, London, 1984; S. C. Welch, India. Art and Culture 1300-1900, New York , 1985, no.281; B. N. Goswamy and E. Fischer, Wonders of a Golden Age, Zurich, 1987, no.109; sales in these rooms 10 June, 1963, lots 1-64 (the Linnean Society group); 29 April, 1992, lot 1; 23 October 1992, lots 492-494; 22 October 1993, lot 229; 24 April 1996, lot 67; 13 October 2004, lot 22; 14 April 2010, lot 87.