Nawab Abd Al-Rahman Khan of Jhaggar, Delhi, Company School, Signed by Ghulam Ali Khan, dated 1272 AH/1855 AD

Gouache heightened with gold on paper, depicting Nawab Abd al-Rahman Khan seated against a bolster smoking a hookah with Mir Bahadur Ali, Sundah and a third courtier, laid down on stout paper

In good overall condition, defects along lower right edge, colours and gold bright, some areas of slight rubbing and associated retouching, a few creases, as viewed.
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This is a very rare example of a signed work by Ghulam Ali Khan, one of the foremost artists of the first half of the nineteenth century working for British patrons around Delhi. His best known patrons were the brothers William and James Fraser and Colonel James Skinner. Although many of the works in both the Fraser album and the Skinner album are thought to be by him, very few are signed.

Two large scenes portraying the review of Skinner's Horse, which feature both Skinner and William Fraser riding side-by-side across the parade ground, were painted by Ghulam Ali Khan for Skinner in 1827 and survive in the National Army Museum, London. Two other group portraits of Nawab Abd al-Rahman Khan and his courtiers were painted by Ghulum Ali Khan in 1849 and 1852 (see Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox, Indian Paintings for British Patrons 1770-1860, London, 1991, nos. 16 & 17), in which the same courtiers appear, as well as similar elaborate huqqas and red and white patterned awnings.

The present work is thus a third portrait of this patron, and the Persian labelling of the courtiers in the two Hazlitt pictures allows us to identify the figures here. To the Nawab's right are his aide-de-camp Mir Bahadur Ali (seated) and a house servant, who may be called Ahmad (holding the fly whisk),on the Nawab's left is his hookah-bearer Sundah.

The town of Jhaggar, which is just west of Delhi, was under the rule of Walter Reinhart, husband of Begam Somru, around 1790. In 1794 it was ruled by the soldier and adventurer George Thomas, and following its annexation by the British in 1803 it was granted to Nijabat Khan, a Bariach Pathan from the area around Kandahar, whose family, including Abd al-Rahman Khan, ruled it until 1857 (just after the present work was painted).

A further miniature painting depicting Nawab Abd Al-Rahman Khan of Jhaggar is in the British Library (Add.Or.4680), whilst a genealogical scroll of the ancestry of Mirza Fakhru (son of Bahadur Shah) comprising a miniature similar to the present scene was sold at Christie's London 7 April 2011, lot 295.