Two
strangely similar pictures of Maharajah Ranjit Singh on his beautiful white
horse:
The Indian portrait
is in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the French one is in the Louvre.
“Maharaja
Ranjit Singh.” Opaque watercolour and gold on paper.
Punjab
Plain, ca. 1840
(Victoria
and Albert Museum)
Alfred
de Dreux (1810-1860). “Portrait de Randjiit Sing Baadour, grand roi (maharajah)
du Pendjab”. Oil on canvas, 1838
(Musée
du Louvre)
Strikingly
alike, aren’t they? And it’s not just the
famous white Arab steed.
The second
portrait, by the French painter Alfred de Dreux (variously Dedreux), is by far
the better known of the two. An incredible number of books and websites, including
Pakistani and Sikh ones, use this picture, often as THE authoritative portrait
of the great Sikh hero Ranjit Singh, “The Lion of the Punjab” (1780-1839), without
crediting it to Dreux. I first came across it some years ago, when I was
looking for illustrations of white Arab horses for my Anglo-Indian Regency novel
“The Great Tamasha Cookbook
& Family History”. I didn’t need to use it, but it was so lovely that I
saved it—stupidly without any notes about it.
Recently I tracked down the picture and its
artist on Wikimedia Commons—with some difficulty, as not all of his pictures are
under the one form of his name. After reading up on him a bit I got really puzzled.
Dreux was famous particularly for his paintings of horses—and of course this is
a lovely example. He lived at the time of Louis-Philippe and when the French royal
family emigrated to England after the revolution of 1848 he went, too, but came
back to Paris in 1852 and settled in France. During his visit to England his animal
paintings had become popular with the English aristocracy and he popped back several
times. (The accounts on Wikipedia and the French Wikipédia are agreed on this.)
Ye-eah… But how come he painted a wonderful equestrian
portrait of Ranjit Singh, who never seems to have gone to Europe, when he himself
apparently never went to India? And it’s dated 1840, a year after the sitter
died. Well, he could have done it from earlier studies he’d made, true, so that
isn’t such a problem. I checked Wikipedia’s very long entry on Ranjit Singh and
it’s pretty clear he was so busy at home that he couldn’t possibly have travelled
abroad—though he did receive such English luminaries as Lord Auckland (Governor
General, 1836-1842), whose sister, Emily Eden, recorded the occasion—not to say
sending some of his most precious jewels to their camp for the ladies to see!
(See her “Horses
and jewels of Runjeet Singh”, in the British Library).
Dreux’s picture is just so realistic and its
details seem very right—there are very many Indian portraits of Ranjit Singh in
his old age, with his long beard; and the accoutrements and the umbrella seem
so very Indian—whereas many of the orientalists who were already at this period
beginning to paint faked-up pictures of Eastern scenes only managed to make their
efforts look horribly Western—not to say overdone!
I
looked up the painting on the Louvre’s website and it told me quite a lot about
Dreux and why he painted it but not whether he in fact had a model for it. It
was a gift from General Ventura to Louis-Philippe.
Ventura, a Jewish Italian who served under
Napoleon, was one of the French Army officers who went East after the Emperor’s
fall and ended up in India, serving under Ranjit Singh in the Punjab. There he
became one of the Maharajah’s most successful and trusted generals. He was temporarily
back in France on a diplomatic mission (“Jean-Baptiste Ventura”, Wikipedia) and
commissioned the portrait specially from Dreux.
Here’s what the Louvre says of the painting:
“Don du général Ventura à Louis-Philippe en 1838.
“Description:
“Après la chute de l’Empire, de jeunes officiers de
l’armée de Napoléon Ier se mettent au service des maharadjahs du Pendjab. C’est
le cas notamment de Jean-Baptiste Ventura (1794-1858) qui, retourné dans son
Italie natale après la défaite de Waterloo, émigre en Iran, puis dans les ‘Indes
orientales’ où il s’engage dans l’armée de Randjiit Sing Baadour. Ce dernier
après s’être imposé comme gouverneur de Lahore étend son royaume et crée le
premier État sikh, indépendant jusqu’à la conquête britannique au milieu du 19e
siècle.
“Le portrait commandé par Ventura au peintre
Alfred de Dreux, grand spécialiste de la représentation des chevaux, est autant
celui du souverain que celui de sa monture, légère et dynamique. On devine dans
le nuage de poussière un drapeau tricolore; c’est celui des troupes d’élites
(Fauj-i-Khas) de l’armée, commandées par Ventura lui-même qui leur avait donné
les couleurs de la Révolution française. La mosquée Badshahi de Lahore, dont on
aperçoit les dômes et les minarets à l’arrière-plan, permet de localiser la scène.
Le tableau est offert à Louis-Philippe qui l’envoie au château de Versailles.
Déposé au château de Maisons-Laffitte, il rejoint les collections du Louvre en
1944.”
It didn’t occur to me at that stage that maybe
Dreux got the details off an Indian picture. I decided to look for other copies
of the French portrait online in the hopes that someone would have recounted,
not the commissioning of it, but how on earth Dreux got it so right. The process
was complicated by the facts that, as I mentioned, many sites don’t even acknowledge
the picture as his, and that if his name is mentioned it can be in either of
the two forms. So I just looked for portraits of Ranjit Singh via Google
Images.
… Oh, dear! He must have been painted
hundreds of times, both during his lifetime and by later illustrators, and every
ruddy effort has been copied innumerable times, and they all seemed to be there.
I ploughed on…
And gee! That was when I found it! An Indian
picture of the great man on his Arab steed that was so incredibly like Dreux’s that
I almost fell off my chair. Unbelievable!
So I looked it up on the V&A’s site.
And gee, what did it tell me? Calm down: certainly not that it had any relationship
to Dreux’s painting. The possibility that at some time in its history it might
have been the inspiration for, not to say the actual source of the famous portrait
wasn’t even hinted at—any more than the artistic sources of Dreux’s picture are
mentioned by the Louvre:
“More information:
Physical description: Painting, opaque watercolour and
gold on paper, portrait of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, dressed entirely in green,
rides a white stallion with henna-dyed fetlocks and a crimson saddle-cloth
edged with yellow. He faces right. An attendant with orange turban, yellow shawl
and white jama, holds a crimson parasol over the maharaja's head. The foreground
is green; the background a pale greyish blue with blue sky at the top.
“Summary:
Ranjit Singh (1780-1839) became the first Sikh maharaja
of the Panjab in 1801 and remained ruler until his death. He is shown here with
traditional emblems of royalty, a parasol held over his head, and a turban
jewel. The painting was formerly in the collection of Queen Mary, and English inscriptions
on paintings in the same group suggest that the first (unknown) British owner
acquired the series between October 1839 and November 1840.”
As
far as I’m concerned you’ve only got to look at the pictures to see that they’re
related. The poses are so similar—though Dreux’s upright, more martial Maharajah
is more flattering than the elderly figure in the Indian portrait. But the slant
of the parasol is almost a photographic image. And it’s interesting that, while
not copying the exact colour scheme, Dreux’s use of yellow and his shades of reddish
brown in the sitter’s clothes pick up the maroon and gold of the other. It’s possible
that Ventura brought the Indian picture with him when he and his friend and fellow-officer
General Allard were sent to France on their diplomatic mission, and showed it
to Dreux.
Well, what do you think?
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