{"id":9266,"date":"2025-09-11T10:24:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T10:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/9266\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T10:24:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T10:24:10","slug":"prince-sadruddin-aga-khans-collection-of-indian-and-persian-paintings-to-sell-at-christies-for-more-than-8m-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/9266\/","title":{"rendered":"Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan’s collection of Indian and Persian paintings to sell at Christie’s for more than \u00a38m – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next month in London, Christie\u2019s will sell 95 Indian and Persian paintings from the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan. With estimates ranging from \u00a32,000 to \u00a31m, it is expected to sell for in excess of \u00a38m on 28 October.<\/p>\n

The broad-ranging collection, formed between the 1960s and 1980s, contains Ottoman, Mughal, Deccani and Rajput works alongside 17th century Isfahani artists like Reza Abbasi and Company School paintings by Ghulam Ali Khan and Sheikh Muhammad Amir of Karraya, all dating from between the 16th and 19th centuries.<\/p>\n

Born in France in 1933, the son of the third Aga Khan, Prince Sadruddin, who died in 2003, was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1966 to 1977. Collecting was a joint venture with Princess Catherine and they lived surrounded by these paintings at their home on Lake Geneva, Chateau de Bellerive. Many works have personal labels on the back, \u201cindicating that they were gifts given by and to each other\u201d says Sara Plumbly, Christie\u2019s head of Islamic and Indian art.<\/p>\n

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A Family of Cheetahs in a Rocky Landscape, attributed to Basawan, Mughal India (around 1575-80)<\/p>\n

Courtesy Christie’s<\/p>\n

Plumbly points out that, in his catalogue introduction to the 1998 British Museum exhibition\u00a0Princes, Poets and Paladins, the collector and academic Stuart Cary Welch wrote that visitors to Prince Sadruddin\u2019s home were \u201cstruck by his penchant for the happy and lyrical\u201d, qualities that Plumbly says are reflected in this collection: \u201cMany paintings relate to gardens and flowers, others to animals, the natural world and people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prince Sadruddin and Princess Catherine bought directly from auction and from dealers, some acquisitions made during trips to New York while Prince Sadruddin was a student at Harvard. \u201cThis was a period when a wealth of material was available on the market from the great collections of the late 19th and early 20th\u00a0centuries,\u201d Plumbly says, listing that of Baron Maurice de Rothschild among many others.<\/p>\n

Plumbly describes this is a \u201conce in a generation\u201d sale. \u201cIn terms of other collections of Indian paintings\u2014though very different in nature\u2014in October 2023 we had the auction of\u00a0An Eye Enchanted: Indian Paintings from the Collection of Toby Falk.\u00a0That comprised over 150 paintings from the collection of the respected late scholar Toby Falk who left a lasting legacy in our field.\u201d The auction made \u00a32.8m [with fees], though Plumby notes the works in the Falk sale \u201cwere both far more modest in nature and lesser known \u2013 many hadn\u2019t been published and exhibited in the way that these have.\u201d<\/p>\n

She picks out three particular highlights from the Aga Khan sale. First,\u00a0Eight Horse Merchants,\u00a0from the Fraser Album, a series of paintings which depict life in early 19th\u00a0century Delhi, accumulated by two Scotsmen serving in India, William Fraser and his brother James Baillie Fraser. \u201cThe pages we have exemplify the very best of the album\u2014rich in detail, character and atmosphere, they capture the essence of the Fraser Album,\u201d Plumbly says. \u201cIt includes all the album has to offer\u2014single figure studies, dancing girls, village scenes, and well-knit groups of figures. They\u2019ve been described by some as \u2018photography before the camera was invented\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Eight Horse Merchants, a page from the Fraser Album, by a Master of the Fraser Album, probably Ghulam Ali Khan (around 1816-20)<\/p>\n

Courtesy Christie’s<\/p>\n

Second, an early Mughal painting of a Family of Cheetahs (est \u00a3700,000-\u00a31m), one of the earliest natural history studies known to exist and attributed by scholars to Basawan, one of the Emperor Akbar\u2019s favourite artists. \u201cIt has been exhibited and published on numerous occasions including amongst others, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rietberg Museum, Zurich, the British Museum, London and the Mus\u00e9e d’art et d’histoire, Geneva and has been esteemed by art historians for several decades,\u201d Plumbly says.<\/p>\n

Finally, Plumbly picks out a painting of A Prince Hawking, the poster image for the British Museum\u00a0Princes, Poets and Paladins\u00a0exhibition (est \u00a3700,000-\u00a31m) and previously in the collection of Baron Maurice de Rothschild. \u201cIt is one of very few known works by the artist Muhammad Ali, who spent time in both the Deccan [Central India] and at the Mughal Court,\u201d Plumbly says. Cary Welch wrote of the work that it depicted \u201ca most ornamental huntsman astride a Nijinsky of a horse\u201d.<\/p>\n

The collection is not currently guaranteed and Plumbly anticipates interest to come from India and more internationally. \u201cThe market for Indian and Persian paintings generally is strong, with Indian paintings in particular in very high demand at the moment,\u201d she says, pointing to the example of a heavily illustrated\u00a0late Mughal copy\u00a0of the\u00a0Shahnama\u00a0of Fidawsi which sold at Christie\u2019s London earlier this year\u00a0for over \u00a32m, against a pre-sale estimate \u00a3700,000 to \u00a31m.<\/p>\n

Plumbly adds that because of their long provenance, \u201cthese are works that can easily be acquired by museums who often have more stringent acquisition policies and need early documented provenance in order to be able to buy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Next month in London, Christie\u2019s will sell 95 Indian and Persian paintings from the collection of Prince and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9224,10280,7123,146,85,10279,46],"class_list":["post-9266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-art-market","tag-auctions","tag-christies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-indian-art","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}