Rajasthan, Sawar, India
Sub-Imperial Mughal
Circa 1680
Opaque watercolour heightened with gold on buff paper
22.5 x 30.3 cm
This portrait of a magnificently caparisoned, dark grey royal elephant, powerful yet genial and gentle, shows the great beast untethered and strolling against the plain buff ground that is characteristic of the Sawar school of painting.
Another characteristic of Sawar is the distinctive shade of rich orange that colours the elephant’s saddlecloth. This piquant tangerine shade may be considered a diagnostic feature of the school, especially when coupled with the plain ground that is repeatedly seen in Sawar pictures. The recognizable style is essentially that of partially coloured drawings, with areas of minimal shading to create volume, and jolts of strong colour that resound against the buff paper. Though red is used sparingly, seen on the painted ornaments on the elephant’s head and trunk, this easily recognizable orange shade is the preferred colour accent; here the orange combines beautifully with the dark shades of grey that impart weight and substance to the elephant’s body.
The linear Sawar style may be observed in the delicate lines of the animal. The creases and folds of the skin and the wispy hairs extending beyond the outlines of the body, are all finely delineated to create texture. The dark hide of the elephant lightens at the belly and genitalia, the top of the chest and the end of the trunk; this slight modulation of tone creates volume and visual interest, reminding us that the Sawar painting technique is essentially a coloured drawing technique where every stroke of the brush counts.
The saddlecloth is secured by white ropes and gold chains with dangling bells. The elephant has a jewelled collar set with rubies and festooned with bells. The tusks are ringed and capped with gold. The elephant’s head ornament, attached by gold chains and rings, is a sarpech made of wild boar’s tusks that echo in miniature its own large tusks. On the raised left foot of the walking elephant is a chain to which he is normally tethered in the royal stable.
A drawing dating from circa 1680 of Thakur Pratap Singh of Sawar (reigned 1668-1705) on a similarly delineated elephant was published by Indar Pasricha in his seminal article that was influential in defining the characteristics of the Sawar school.(1) Other Sawar paintings of elephants all tend, like here, to have orange saddlecloths; the orange is also used in court and garden scenes of the rajas and equestrian portraits.(2)
Painting from the small thikana of Sawar, located in southeast Rajasthan almost equidistant between Ajmer and Kotah and, virtually on the borders of the larger states of Bundi and Mewar, was an area of abiding interest to the eminent scholar, Sotheby’s auctioneer and collector Toby Falk. As paintings appeared on the market, Falk was able to identify the Sawar school, something he very much enjoyed and was clearly excited by. The present painting comes from Falk’s own collection of masterpieces from the Sawar school which he helped to establish and was a pioneer in collecting.
The thikana of Sawar was founded by Shah Jahan in 1627 to reward Gokul Das, one of the Rajput nobles who fought with him in his rebellion against his father Jahangir in 1623, in the course of which Gokul Das had received eighty-four wounds, a propitious number.(3) Gokul Das was a great grandson of Maharana Uday Singh of Mewar, so the Sawar rulers are closely related to the Sisodia dynasty of Udaipur.
Bundi and Kotah were the closest major courts and there is a definite affinity between Sawar elephant drawings and those of Kotah. However, elements of the Mewar style at Udaipur can also be detected, specifically that of painting during the reign of Maharana Amar Singh (1698-1710) and the work of his leading artist, the “Stipple Master”. Amar Singh’s reign and his unusual taste as a patron of painting, and the active period of his great “Stipple Master”, coincide with the development of a distinct local style of painting at Sawar towards the end of Pratap Singh’s reign (1668-1705) which continued under his successor Raj Singh (1705-1730).
The initial identification of Sawar as a painting centre depended on the number of paintings clearly identified as being of Thakur Raj Singh of Sawar, the great grandson of Gokul Das. While some are fully coloured, for example the richly painted portrait of Maharaja Raj Singh illustrated in Andrew Topsfield, Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin, 2012, pp. 210-211, cat. no. 89, a considerable proportion are left only partly coloured, such as another in the Hodgkin Collection illustrated in the same book by Topsfield, 2012, pp. 212-213, cat. no. 90. This is a celebrated and much published square painting of circa 1714 depicting Maharaja Raj Singh receiving a yogi in a garden full of birds. The crucial thing is that the painting is inscribed in devanagari on the reverse “Maharaja Raj Singh … it is from Sawar”, thus indisputably identifying both sitter and school. It is on buff paper, largely uncoloured or lightly coloured in areas, with shots of orange in the painting and forming the border. Topsfield’s observations on this painting illuminate characteristics applicable to much of the Sawar school:
“Using the uncoloured buff paper as its ground, this is a picture of exceptional charm, combining court painting conventions with the decorative freedoms of Rajasthani folk art. As Howard Hodgkin has remarked; ‘it has a peculiar combination of the naïve and sophisticated, particularly in terms of scale.’”(4)
On pp. 216-217 of the same publication, cat. no. 91, Topsfield illustrates and discusses another Sawar painting in the Hodgkin Collection depicting Maharaja Raj Singh and his elephants. Once again Raj Singh is usefully identified by inscription and the lightly coloured drawing contains a multitude of elephants drawn in a manner much like our present painting, showing Kotah influence, but lightly coloured in the now established Sawar style showing Mewari influence of the “Stipple Master”. The distinctive tangerine is accompanied by an equally piquant olive green and a sharp acidic yellow, all of which enliven the buff ground. As Hodgkin observes: “The technical elaboration of the drawing itself suggests that it must have been made as a work of art in its own right rather than as a study for something else.”(5)
Topsfield describes another inscribed Sawar painting of Maharaja Raj Singh cosseted by his ladies from the Cynthia Hazen Polsky Collection now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv. no.2002.65ab) and exhibited at the Asia Society Museum, New York, in Andrew Topsfield (ed.), In the Realm of Gods and Kings: Arts of India, 2004, pp. 334-335, cat. no. 148. His observations on this picture reinforce our understanding of the Sawar school:
“Under Maharaja Raj Singh … the small court of Sawar in central Rajasthan saw a flowering of scenes of court life, painted in a manner that combines naive charm with a subtle refinement. Its spare, semi-coloured compositions show affinities with similar developments at Udaipur under Maharana Amar Singh of Mewar … who was head of the Sisodia Rajput clan to which the Sawar chiefs belonged.”(6)
The partly coloured finish developed by the “Stipple Master” is discussed by Catherine Glynn in her chapter on “The Stipple Master” in Masters of Indian Painting II: 1650-1900, 2011, pp. 515-530. Glynn notes that the style of the “Stipple Master” first appeared when the artist would have been with the Mewar Maharana Amar Singh in Rajnagar, to where Amar Singh had been banished after his revolt against his father Maharana Jai Singh in 1691. Rajnagar is less than 40 km from Sawar and it seems quite possible that the Sawar style was imported by an artist from Rajnagar, probably one trained before 1698 when Amar Singh returned to Udaipur. However, in strong contrast to the eponymous stippling of the master, paintings from Sawar execute shading with very fine lines of a darker tone or black, almost as an engraving, showing clear influence from the drawing style of Kotah. All these features are to be found in the Sawar paintings collected by Toby Falk.
References:
Provenance:
Indar Pasricha, London, 1988 (published)
Toby Falk (1942-1997)
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