File:Portrait of an Indian Lady, traditionally called the Bibi of John Wombwell (d. 1795) (by Arthur William Devis).jpg

English: Arthur William Devis (London 1762 - 1822)

Portrait of an Indian Lady, traditionally called the Bibi of John Wombwell (d. 1795)

oil on canvas: 71.4 x 56 cm.; 28⅛ x 22 in.

This striking and rare portrait of a sumptuously attired Indian lady has traditionally been attributed to Charles Smith, a Scottish painter working in India in the late eighteenth century of whom very little is known. However, modern scholarship has now correctly identified the painting as the work of Arthur William Devis, an attribution which is corroborated by comparison with a number of other known works painted during the artist’s early years in India. The young lady, clearly of some significant social standing given the sumptuousness of her dress, has as yet been unidentified. She has long been associated with the status of a bibi – the mistress of a British Company official – but certainly represents a high-born woman of noble birth.

Devis arrived in India in 1785, when in his early twenties, having survived the shipwreck of the East India packet boat Antelope, on which he had been commissioned by the Company as official draftsman during a voyage through the South Pacific, much as William Hodges had with Captain Cook ten years earlier. His ship having been wrecked on Oroolong (Ulong), in the Pelew Islands, Devis spent some time there sketching Abba Thulle, the ibedul or paramount chief of what is modern day Palau, as well as a number of his wives and other islanders, before he and the rest of the crew were able to make it to Canton, from where Devis travelled on to Bengal.

In Calcutta he quickly established himself as one of the leading European painters in India, painting portraits of a number of the most eminent figures among the British community, including Warren Hastings, the Governor-General. Devis would also paint Hasting’s successor, Lord Cornwallis, and despite the presence of several distinguished rivals in Bengal at the time, including Johan Zoffany, Thomas Hickey and Francesco Renaldi, he maintained a prominent position at the forefront of fashionable patronage. Many even thought his work superior to that of his main rivals, as his fellow artist and superintendent of the Free School Society in Calcutta, William Baillie, commented: ‘Devis paints most delightfully, I think, especially small figures in which I like his handling and colouring even better than Zoffany’s.’

More so than most European artists working in India, however, with the possible exception of Renaldi, Devis’s work in India demonstrates a clear interest in the native population of the Subcontinent – a sensibility that some historians have credited to his experiences in the Pellew Islands. Whilst principally based in Calcutta, he made frequent trips out into the surrounding country to sketch Indian villagers at work. In the autumn of 1786 he travelled as far as Patna, on the south bank of the Ganges in the north eastern state of Bihar. There he made studies of local people engaged in their traditional industries, including paper and saltpetre making, as well as the weaving of stripped cotton carpets, known as satringis, for which Patna was famous. It may be to this trip that the present portrait relates, particularly with the richly stripped textiles of the lady’s divan and the notable cusped archway in the background, typical of India’s northern cities. One of the most ambitious projects of Devis’s career was a scheme for publishing a series of thirty prints of the Arts, Manufactures and Agriculture of Bengal, taken from his own paintings, in preparation for which he spent the Autumn of 1793 in Santipore, about fifty miles north of Calcutta, painting scenes of local industry and portraits of local figures, such as Byraggy or Hindu holy men. Though the projected series of prints never materialised following his return to England due to financial difficulties, the series of paintings he produced in preparation for it were exhibited in Madras to much acclaim and a umber were later shown at the Royal Academy. Notably, Devis imparts a graceful dignity upon his subjects in these studies of local scenes, treating his subjects with complete parity and respect.

In 1793 Devis also travelled to Madras in order to take portrait studies of members of the Madras Army and the sons of Tipu Sultan for a planned depiction of the surrender of Tipu’s sons to Lord Cornwallis at the Siege of Seringpatam; a painting he finally exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802. The young princes delighted in presenting themselves for the artist as they had been attired on the fateful day, and he also sketched the young son of Tipu’s vakil (lawyer or agent), Ali Reza Khan, who accompanied the princes to Madras.

Reclining on a richly cushioned divan, wearing a saffron coloured sari and sumptuous jewels, the unknown Indian lady depicted in this portrait is clearly somebody of noble birth and high social status. At her side is a gilt stemmed cup overflowing with jewels, while a bihishti lays the dust in the courtyard beyond. It is a scene of opulent leisure and casual refinery. The composition closely relates to a portrait of Anne Heatly, probably the bibi of Suetonius Grant Heatly, an American born East India Company official who held positions at Chotanagpur, Palamu and Purina. Both paintings share the same compositional elements, including the red bolster and cushions with their green and yellow stripped bordering; the tazza like cup with its hanging pearls; the archway and the background figures; whilst the sitter’s themselves share the same heavy-lidded eyes; soft, flowing drapery and elegantly reclining pose. The portrait of Anne Heatly, which appeared at auction in 2006, was also previously given to Charles Smith. However, following subsequent cleaning and restoration, it has also now been correctly identified as being by Devis. The two paintings, almost mirror images of each other, save for the difference in format (the portrait of Heatly being in landscape), clearly belong to the same moment in the artist’s career.

Whilst the sitter in the present portrait remains unknown, as Mildred Archer noted, she is too confident in her poise to be an orthodox Muslim woman of rank – who would not have allowed herself to be painted in public – and is most likely the bibi of another high-ranking British official. The term bibi has its roots in the Indian word for ‘princess’ and served as a personalised or intimate reference to the women who first formed relationships with European traders in the seventieth century who were, in fact, mostly princesses of Indian royal families. Young women taken from the royal zenana – sisters, nieces, daughters of the ruling nawab or his brothers – and given in arranged marriages to important European officials, they played an important role in strengthening the diplomatic alliances between a reigning nawab and powerful Company representatives that promoted the political and economic interests of both parties (much in the same way that European royal courts use arranged marriage as a means of strengthening diplomatic ties). Well educated at home by elderly scholars, these noblewomen were literate, often able to speak and read several languages and regional dialects, and schooled in the study of mathematics, history, the natural sciences and medicine. In many cases these marriages produced genuinely happy unions, with the multi-racial offspring they produced further helping to knit the Indian and European communities together.

The custom of high-ranking British Company officials taking an aristocratic Indian mistress continued as both a social and political necessity well into the eighteenth century, to which a number of known portraits of the mistresses of British officials by the likes of Zoffany, Renaldi and James Wales attest. The practice was finally ended by the Marquess Wellesley when he was Governor-General in the 1790s, following which the British and Indian communities became increasing segregated through the course of the nineteenth century. Archer, in her 1979 catalogue of British artists in India, suggested that the lady in this portrait could be the bibi of John Wombwell, paymaster, treasurer and auditor of accounts of the East India Company in Lucknow, based on an earlier reference to a portrait of this lady by Zoffany. However, there does not appear to be any sound evidence to support this identification and given that Wombwell was a major patron of Zoffany’s, who travelled with him to Cawnpore, Dehli and Agra, it seems more likely that this reference is indeed to a lost portrait by Zoffany.

Note on Provenance

The early provenance for this picture is supplied by Mildred Archer, who took it from an old label on the reverse of the painting which has been removed since the publication of her book (see Literature). This label indicated that the work was acquired by Thomas Richmond, brother to the famous painter George, from Henry Chicheley Plowden, who had been in India in the late-eighteenth century. Plowden was appointed to the Bengal Infantry in 1773, at the age of seventeen, transferring to the post of ‘Writer’ (clerk) in the East India Company’s civil service later that same year. He had a long career in India, becoming the Company’s Salt Agent in Chittagong in 1817, before finally retiring to his English estate at Newton Grove, Hampshire, in 1819, where he lived until his death in 1821. Plowden had also owned a Portrait of Shuja-ud-daula, Nawab of Oudh by Tilly Kettle (Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven). The painting later passed to Sir Henry Russell, 2nd Bt., who served as British Resident at Poona in 1809 and then Hyderabad from 1810-1820, before retiring to Sutton Park in Bedfordshire, Southernhay House in Exeter and later Swallowfield Park in Berkshire. Richmond painted the Russell family in the 1840s, and it may have been through this connection that they acquired the painting.