Sufi shaykh reading, India, Delhi or Lucknow, 19th century Gouache, ink and gold on paper depicting a wise man reading on a terrace in front of a hilly landscape with a river flowing at the foot of a palace. A long gray beard betrays the advanced age of the mullah, who wears a broad white turban and matching jama and cape. He is seated cross-legged on a carpet, his back resting against a cushion, reading a red-bound book while a stack of two books is placed in front of him. In the foreground, a bowl and two pigeons keep him company. In the lower right, a probably apocryphal inscription in black ink attributing the painting to Faiz 'Alî Khan and dating it to 1270 H / 1853". Mounted as an album page with a gold-powdered brown border on black-margined card. Size of painting: 23.8 x 12.9 cm, page: 29 x 18 cm Some polychromy, small folds and slight retouching. The subject of this painting may be Shaykh Mu'in ad-Dîn Hassan Chisti (1141-1230), grand master of the Christiyya Sufi brotherhood founded in Afghanistan in the 10th century. It was thanks to Hassan Chisti that the order spread to India, where it traveled in 1193. A famous portrait of the sage is taken from the Shah Jahan Album and kept at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (55.121.10.26). Faiz 'Ali Khan, whose name was probably added later in the lower right-hand corner of the composition, was an artist from the Company School in Delhi, brother of the great Ghulam 'Ali Khan.