Workshop of Ghulam Ali Khan
Kala with Sabre Drawn, and Kala in Uniform, from the Fraser Album
The same man, twice: as himself, and in uniform.
- Artist
- Workshop of Ghulam Ali Khan
- Date
- 1815–1816, Delhi
- Medium
- Watercolour on paper, two album pages
- Where it is
- The David Collection, Copenhagen (58/2007 and 59/2007)
- Kind
- Company painting
Two portraits of one man named Kala, on plain white paper. In the first he stands bare-chested in a dhoti with a curved sabre drawn. In the second he wears a red-and-black jacket, white breeches, tall boots and a tall hat, a sabre at his side. The face is the same in both.
The pages come from the Fraser Album, commissioned by William Fraser, a Company civil servant in Delhi, and his brother James. About ninety pictures are known, mostly made between 1815 and 1819: soldiers, villagers, moneylenders, horse-dealers, each named underneath. Many sitters were troopers of Skinner’s Horse.
Some are given on grounds of style to Ghulam Ali Khan and his family workshop; he also painted for the Mughal emperor in Delhi. The album lay forgotten in the Frasers’ papers until 1979 and was sold off in separate lots in 1980.
