Two folios from a dispersed Shahnama, Delhi, North India, circa 1840, ink and opaque pigments on ...

Two folios from a dispersed Shahnama, Delhi, North India, circa 1840, ink and opaque pigments on paper heightened with gold, illustrating the death of Rostam and Bahram Gur fights a dragon, each with lines of black nastaliq Persian above and below, the reverse of each with 25ll. of black nastaliq Persian arranged in four vertical columns, painting 21 x 12cm., folio 30.5 x 19.5cm. (2)Footnotes: The epic poem Shahnama, or Book of Kings, was composed in 1010 by the Persian poet Firdowsi and recounts the life of the Shahnama's heroic king Rustam, recognizable by his red beard.The illustrations in this lot recall the work of Ghulam 'Ali Khan and his studio whilst at the court of Alwar. It is there that the Mughal artist from Delhi produced an ambitious Gulistan for Raja Banni Singh, some time between 1840 and 1853 (William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, London, 2012, fig.9,10,12, pp.46-19). The Shahnama from which these folios originate is an illustration of the taste for dynastic histories and classical Persian works under the reign of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah.