Illustration of a Ragamala, Bhairavi Ragini, Mughal India, s - Lot 176

Illustration of a Ragamala, Bhairavi Ragini, Mughal India, second half of 18th century Gouache and gold on paper depicting a woman praying to Shiva, kneeling before a lingam adorned with a necklace of flowers and framed by a pair of torches. Behind her, a woman standing next to her holds wreaths of flowers in a bowl. Behind the terrace on which they stand, a landscape of tree-lined hills, behind which stand architectural aediculae. Mounted on an album page with gold and blue borders and a beige margin, captioned in Urdu nasta'liq and numbered 33 top left. On the reverse, a large, later composition of a plant with poly-lobed foliage and violet flowers in bloom or bud, framed by two birds in flight and two palmipeds on the ground, the whole surrounded by two yellow borders squared in black flanking an apple-green margin captioned in Urdu nasta'liq and numbered 34 at top right. Framed. Dim. page: 30.1 x 21.2 cm; dim. painting with women: 16.2 x 10.2 cm; dim. painting with plant: 20.7 x 14 cm Stains, polychromy leaks, folds, small edge accidents and mounting marks, discontinuous edge on reverse. Provenance : Sotheby's sale, London, Sir Thomas Phillips Collection, Bibliotheca Phillipica sale (4th sale), November 26, 1968, lot 309. Sir Thomas Phillips (1792-1872), who was in possession of this page, was a great British bibliophile, member of the Royal Society and collector of over 40,000 manuscripts. A very similar album page from the same collection sold at Artcurial, Paris on November 4, 2014, lot 246. It too features a floral decoration framed by animals on the reverse of a scene animated by characters. It is described as having been part of the Lucknow Album (MS.26074) assembled in the 1780s by Sir Thomas Phillips, and the kinship between the two pages suggests that our page belongs to this same album. Another known page from this album sold at Bonhams New York on March 19, 2012, lot 1170. Paris private collection, lots 166 to 193.