Portrait of Begam Samru
1830
paint
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1830
paint
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Portrait of Begam Samru is a 1830 paint by Jivan Ram, a Patna School of Painting work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This painting shows a woman sitting in a fancy chair. She's dressed in nice clothes and has a serious look. The woman in the painting, Begam Samru, had a really interesting life - she started as a dancing girl and later became the leader of an army after her husband died. To learn more about the style of this painting, look at the movement: Romanticism.
The 1830 portrait by Jiwan Ram depicts Begam Samru, a former Kashmiri dancing-girl who became a powerful military leader after inheriting her husband’s army and fiefdom in Sardhana. Wearing a Kashmir shawl and holding a huqqa-snake, she is shown seated against a draped curtain in a style blending Indian and European artistic traditions. The work belongs to the Company painting genre produced for British patrons in India during the 18th and 19th centuries. At nearly 80 years old at the time, the portrait captures her status as a wealthy Christian convert who had commissioned a church in…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jiwan Ram (fl. 1820 – c. 1850) was an Indian artist active in the 19th century. He was a Delhi-based painter who worked with oil-on-canvas techniques but was a versatile artist who could work in other methods and…
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