An impressive Mughal ivory-inlaid wood cabinet depicting European figures

Western India, early 17th century

Footnotes

Provenance
Dr. Caro Owen Minasian Collection, acquired in the 1940s, and thence by descent.

The present lot is a large and outstanding example from a small group of ivory-inlaid cabinets depicting European figures. They can be identified by their western costumes, which stand out from those of their Indian counterparts, and are characterised by voluminous trousers and rounded caps. The figure on the present lot was identified in a hand written note by Dr. Caro Minasian as Sir Thomas Roe (1581-1644), the first English ambassador to the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) between 1616 and 1619. Indeed, the clothes represented are comparable to those worn by Sir Thomas Roe in a Mughal painting in the British Museum, London, dated circa 1616, depicting him in attendance as Jahangir invests a courtier with a robe of honour (Museum Number 1933,0610,0.1). Furthermore, the style of the cabinet would point towards a date of production at around the time that Sir Thomas was in India. Today, his journal entries, notes and correspondence, compiled in The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, are considered valuable first hand accounts of the court of Emperor Jahangir. For further details and discussion of Sir Thomas Roe's time at the Mughal Court, see Colin Paul Mitchell, Sir Thomas Roe and the Mughal Empire, Karachi, 2000.

This type of ivory-inlaid furniture is believed to have originated in Western India, more specifically in Gujarat and Sindh (see Amin Jaffer, Luxury Goods from India, The Art of the Indian Cabinet Maker, London, 2002). Intricately crafted chests and cabinets such as these appealed to both local and foreign tastes, with documents and miniatures recording Mughal rulers with European-style furniture, including a 17th century portrait of Rustam Khan in the Chester Beatty library (Jorge Flores and Nuno Vassallo e Silva (eds.), Goa and The Great Mughal, exhibition catalogue, Lisbon, 2004, pp. 111-115).

An example of a box featuring European figures is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no 2000.301). A further ivory-inlaid cabinet, the top half of which is of very similar form to ours, in the Museu Nacional De Arte Antiga, features European figures hunting on horseback (inv. no. 1312 Mov). In these examples, as in ours, the figures are depicted hunting in scenes emulating those of Persian and Indian paintings. For a smaller ivory-inlaid cabinet featuring European figures sold at Sotheby's, see Art of the Islamic World, 20 April 2016, lot 139. The dense foliate ground on our cabinet is also a fine example of its type, and comparable to that found on a cabinet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IM 16-1931).

Dr. Caro Owen Minasian (1897-1973) was an Armenian physician and collector. Having attended the English College in Isfahan, he went on to study medicine at the Universities of London, Edinburgh, and Lausanne. Throughout his lifetime Dr. Minasian amassed an extensive collection of Armenian, Persian, and Near Eastern books and manuscripts.

The item within this lot containing ivory has been registered in accordance with the Ivory Act (Section 10), reference no. NVKEC9P4.