Samuel Lover

SAMUEL LOVER (Dublin, 1797 - Saint Helier, 1868).
"Imperial India", 1835.
Painting on bone.
With inscription on the back.
Presents original period frame.
Measurements: 5 x 6 cm (miniature), 12 x 14 cm (frame).

The piece consists of a circular miniature painted by Samuel Lover, R.H.A. (1797-1868), dated 1835 according to the original inscription on the back. The composition represents nine architectural views of imperial India organized around a central image of the Taj Mahal, within an aesthetic linked to the so-called Company School, developed in the Anglo-Indian context of the first half of the 19th century.

The work is extremely meticulously executed and retains its original period frame, decorated with floral motifs that seem to allude to the national emblems of the United Kingdom: the Tudor rose, the Scottish thistle and the Irish shamrock. This detail reinforces the diplomatic and institutional context of the piece.

The reverse retains a handwritten inscription of great documentary importance: "Painted by S. Lover for the Indian Moulvie Mahomet Ishmael Khan the Ambassador of the King of Oude. 1835." This inscription identifies the author, the recipient and the exact date of execution. Mahomet Ishmael Khan was ambassador of the kingdom of Oudh (Oude) in London during the 1830s.

The relationship between Samuel Lover and Mahomet Ishmael Khan is documented in The Life of Samuel Lover, R.H.A. by W. Bayle Bernard (1874), which mentions the personal and professional contact between the two in London in 1835. This reference brings historical coherence to the inscription and reinforces the contextual authenticity of the work.

From an art-historical point of view, the piece is particularly interesting because it is an early and exceptionally documented example of Anglo-Indian imagery linked to British Orientalist taste. The existence of iconographically similar works in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, although catalogued at a later date and without an identified author, places this miniature within a very scarce group of comparable pieces.

Everything indicates that the work was conceived in a diplomatic context, possibly as a personal commission or institutional present related to the relations between the court of Oudh and the British elite during the years prior to the annexation of the kingdom by the British Empire.