A Meeting of Princes at the Court of Maharaja Sansar Chand of Kangra, attributed to Purkhu of Kangra, Pahari, Kangra, circa 1803

Opaque watercolour and gold on paper, inscribed on backing paper with the names of chief participants

Formerly in the Collection of John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006, the esteemed economist and diplomat), Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Indian Painting, 15th-19th Centuries, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1965
Gods, Thrones and Peacocks, Northern Indian Painting from Two Traditions: Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries, Asia House Gallery; Baltimore Museum of Art; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, 1965-1966
Life at Court: Art for India's Rulers, 16th-19th Centuries, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1985-86

Randhawa 1961, p .8
Harvard 1965, no.64
Welch and Beach 1965, pg. 103, no. 70
Archer 1973, p. 202, no. 23
Desai 1985, p. 115, no. 94
Goswamy and Fischer 1992, p. 374, no. 161
Habighorst, Reichart and Sharma 2007, pl.34, p.60
Beach, Goswamy and Fischer 2011, pp.714,717,719

In good condition, very minor creasing and rubbing on four corners, the bottom centr edge and the centre right edge, minor rubbing to the inscriptions, very light spots of staining, as viewed.
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In this splendid darbar scene, Sansar Chand (1775-1823), the celebrated ruler of the Punjab Hills, is surrounded by eleven rajas from nearby states. The artist has produced a masterful composition. With a clear but subtle symmetry, the strong diagonal arrangement of figures down either side, recalling numerous earlier Indian darbar and enthronement scenes from the earliest Mughal examples (such as the famous Princes of the House of Timur) onwards, is offset by the counter-diagonals of the figures' sword belts and cross-belts,  and the more random diagonals of the peacock-feather flywhisks. The formal triangle of rajas is delightfully juxtaposed to the playful arrangement of the huqqa pipes, which echo the symmetry of the figures above and below, but whose calligraphic curves have an almost musical rhythm and delicacy.

Sansar is identified by his orange turban and a yak-tail fly whisk held above his head. Sansar's heir-apparent, Anirudh is placed beside Prithi Singh of Nurpur. Seated next to Sansar is Bhup Singh, the de facto ruler of Guler and one of the senior officials in the Hill family of rajas. The positioning of the other rajas reflects their position within the Punjab political sphere. Unusually Sansar Chand is not the only one smoking a huqqa which was normally the case when he was depicted alongside his family and courtiers. The fact that all the prominent rajas are also illustrated smoking possibly demonstrates their authority within their respective lands. It has been suggested that this painting is a depiction of a particular darbar that was held after the war with the Sikhs in 1803. What is interesting to note is that Sansar's brother Fateh is absent from the composition, probably due to him befriending the Sikhs and defecting to the Sikh court in 1803.

The artist Purkhu came from an important family of painters and was the son of Dhummun and brother of Buddhu and Rattu. The family originated from Kangra town and moved to the small village of Samloti in 1809. The move was precipitated by Sansar Chand's loss of the fort and town of Kangra to the Sikhs. He was left with a small jagir, with Samloti bordering the boundary between Ranjit Singh's territory and his. Apparently more than four separate families of painters relocated to this small village, following the continued patronage of Sansar Chand.

Purkhu's name is mentioned in Baden Powell's Handbook of the Manufactures and Arts of the Panjab; the report of 1864 describes a collection of works belonging to a pandit, most of which "were painted by Purkhu, an artist in the service of Raja Sansar Chand of Katoch, who was a great patron of art and prepared a fine collection of paintings." Purkhu was the favoured painter of Sansar Chand and was seen at court, a great privilege for a painter. Purkhu was Sansar's master artist of portraits and darbar scenes. The English traveller William Moorcroft, writing in 1820, talks of the many hundreds of drawings that the Raja owned that included 'portraits of all the neighbouring families.'

Goswamy and Fischer suggest that Purkhu inherited the essentials of his style from his father, who may have been responsible for the portraits of Sansar Chand's grandfather and father, Ghamand Chand and Tegh Chand. They go on to attribute the Shiva Purana, the Harivamsha series, a Parijata Harana series, a Devi Mahatmya  and a Tulsidasa Ramayana to Purkhu (Goswamy and Fischer 1992, p.370). Purkhu's style, as with the rest of his family, is distinct from that of the Seu-Manaku-Nainsukh family of painters. Purkhu was not concerned with naturalism, he instead saw individuals as types. "His figures tend to be slightly short and the faces somewhat fleshy... the outlines of the figures are almost always firmed up in purple." (ibid, p.372). Some of his paintings are almost more like "visual notes rather than portraits", and he depicts an accurate portrayal of the activities at court, concerning himself with "a sense of place and occasion" (ibid, p.371).