A FOLIO FROM AN ALBUM ASSEMBLED BY COLONEL ANTOINE POLIER: A WOMAN LYING ON THE GROUND VENERATING FIRE, INDIA, MUGHAL, LUCKNOW, CIRCA 1770 |

gouache with gold on paper, mounted on an album page with floral borders, inscribed in French beside miniature '22 Femme Indienne adoratrice du feu', reverse with a page of calligraphy in nasta'liq script consisting of Persian verses signed by Muhammad Baqir, floral borders

From an album made for Colonel Antoine Polier, Lucknow, late eighteenth century.
Ex-private collection, London, 1970, purchased from Thomas Gibson.

In good condition, minor stains, smudges and minor creases, as viewed.
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This folio has the distinctive broad floral borders associated with pages from the albums assembled by Colonel Antoine Polier, one of the greatest of early European collectors of Indian miniatures. Antoine Louis Henri Polier was born in Lausanne in Switzerland in 1741 and began his career as a surveyor in the East India Company in 1758. By 1762 he had become Chief Engineer of the Bengal Army in Calcutta and Chief Architect for the Kingdom of Awadh, working within the Court of Nawab Shuja al-Daula. During his time in India, Polier collected a large number of Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts and Indian miniatures. Polier commissioned works himself as well as acquiring earlier works from others, and established a studio in Faizabad where he employed Mihr Chand as the chief artist. He assembled at least twelve albums of paintings and calligraphy, most of which were later acquired by William Beckford and several of which are now in the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin. For further discussion of Polier and his albums see Roy in Markel and Gude, India's Fabled City, The Art of Courtly Lucknow, Los Angeles, 2011, pp.176-181; Harris, 'Archibald Swinton: a new source of albums of Indian miniatures in William Beckford’s collection', The Burlington Magazine, Vol. CXLIII, Number 1179, June 2001, pp.360-6; Hickman & Enderlein: Indische Albumblatte, Leipzig, 1979, cat. nos.1, 11, 21, 39, 43 and 51; Weber, Portrats und Historisches Darstellungen in der Miniaturensammlung des Museums fur Indisches Kunst, Berlin, Berlin, 1982, pp.364-446.

For other Polier Album leaves at auction see Sotheby’s, London, 12 December 1966, lot 12 (which has a French inscription in the same hand as the present example), 24 April 1979, lot 43, 6 October 2010, lots 80 and 81; 15 June, 2010, lot 5; 8 October 2014, lots 270-2, and 25 October 2017, lot 78; and Sotheby’s, New York, 21 March 2012, lot 224; Christie’s, London, 12 October 2004, lot 176, 25 May 2017, lot 98 (inscribed in French in the same hand as the present work ); Christie’s, New York, 16 September 2008, lots 472, 473 and 475 (all inscribed in French in the same hand as the present work).