Lot 67: A SET OF FIVE SOUTH INDIAN COMPANY SCHOOL WATERCOLOUR AND GOUACHE STUDIES OF FIGURES, 19TH CENTURY

A set of five South Indian Company School ethnographic studies executed in watercolour and gouache with opaque highlights on thick cream-coloured card. The figures are depicted in traditional attire against simplified landscape backgrounds featuring blue-hued mountains and brown-toned foregrounds. The subjects include a male servant carrying a curved brass horn, a festival pilgrim carrying a kavadi decorated with peacock feathers, a Mappillah man holding a closed black umbrella and a small vessel, a female dancer in a blue and red sari, and a woman seated beneath a palm tree spinning thread at a wooden charkha. Each card bears a handwritten inscription in black ink at the bottom centre in German. The inscriptions read Diener, Festpilger mit Kavadi, Mappillah, Tanzerin, and Spulerin.

For the kavati-bearer, see another portrayal and discussion in A. L. Dallapiccola, South Indian Paintings: a Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, London 2010, p. 185, no. 15.1 (from an album dated 1830-35).

21.6 by 13cm each