Galerie de personnages indiens peints sur mica

Album of 61 original colour paintings, including 27 on mica and 34 on paper and 1 drawing in black and white on paper. The colours are obtained by a mixture of English watercolour and gum arabic.

Mica, a mineral from the silicate group, is divided into thick layers laid on top of one another and that are easy to extract. Although it withstands very high temperatures and is a very effective insulator, it is nonetheless very fragile. Paintings on mica in such a beautiful state of conservation are rare and all the more so in France where only two albums are kept at the Musée du Quai Branly. We do not know the number of paintings held in these collections, of which only one of the two is stylistically close to ours.

The paintings are all produced in the Patna style (North East India), characterised by its minimalist decorations and painted freehand without prior drawing of the outlines. They are very detailed and all captioned in English and French; they depict the professions and trades of native men and women: Parsis, pearl merchant, Madras peddler, milk merchant, weaver, Malayalam wailer, domestic servant, coachman, barber, palanquin carrier, juggler, launderer... Some other paintings and drawings – on paper – feature animals (scorpion, snake), weapons and jewellery.

Contemporary half black shagreen binding, black paper boards, marbled endpapers.

These illustrations, produced in the second half of the 19th century, are emblematic of an important period of change in the history of Indian painting. Pictorial art then leaves the domain of the sacred and the native painters and develops new hybrid styles influenced by Western artists who came, armed with their colours and their easels, to visit India. Modern Indian art has just taken off.
Originally, and despite having been produced with great finesse, these images were not considered as works of art, neither by the craftsmen who made them, nor by their purchasers – mainly Englishmen. Above all, they had a documentary and recreational value, as evidenced by the British Trade Company's large orders to show the United Kingdom life in the colonies and to promote trade. At the same time, a similar approach was observed in Japan, which had just opened up to the western world, through Felice Beato's superb photograph.

Provenance: Laurent Dard, colonel of the Marine Artillery, then his daughter Laurence Anna Cesbron-Lavau born in 1869 on the boat that led his family to India.