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| Related Articles: Book - Sikh Portraits By European Artists http://www.sikhnet.com/Sikhnet/discussion.nsf/3d8d6eacce83bad8872564280070c2b3/2543b9dc9fd656ab8725682b0072123b!OpenDocument&Highlight=0,aijazuddin European Impressions Of Sikh Martial Traditions http://sikhnet.com/sikhnet/discussion.nsf/3d8d6eacce83bad8872564280070c2b3/56375dc6a6f43a6b87256834006886a3!OpenDocument ******************************************************************************* From the book: Sikh Portraits By European Artists, F.S. Aijazuddin ********************************************** J.F. Allard (1785 - 1839) Born on 8 March 1785, at St Tropez, France, Jean Francois Allard joined the French army at the age of eighteen and saw service initially in Italy, Naples and Spain. Second to Marshal Brune under Napolean Bonaparte, Allard's loyalty for the ex-Emperor, even after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, was the direct cause of his departure from France. Allard has been known to have been employed in the Egyptian army and subsequently to have moved to Tehran where, while he was trying to obtain a comission under the Shah Abbas, General Ventura convinced him that they would both benefit by moving to the Sikh Court at Lahore. Allard, accompanying Ventura, arrived in Lahore on 23 March, 1822. Ranjit Singh was already aware of their progress and without delay invited the two visitors to his palace..... Ranjit Singh's attitude towards Allard remained cordial throughout their association. Impressed from the outset by Allard's ingenuity in crossing the Indus at Attock in 1823 with the loss of only three men...Ranjit Singh extended to Allard every courtesy in public, even to the extent (if Jacquemont is to be believed) of rising to his feet whenever Allard presented himself in Darbar... Allard's distinctive looks did not escape Miss Emily's attention. She wrote of him on 5 December to a friend: 'Allard wears an immensly long beard that he is always stroking and making much of; and I was dead absent all the time he was there because his wings are beautiful white hair, and his moustachios and the middle of his beard quite black. He looks like a piebald horse. Miss Eden was not alone in noticing Allard's impressive beard. It had been regarded by Jacquemont earlier as perhaps one of the factors for the unusual respect accorded to him by the Sikhs.... On 31 January 1839, General Allard was dead. His body was brought to Lahore and laid in state in his house. Lieutenant Barr viewed the body and also remembered in his memoirs a portrait of Allard which hung in the dining room of Ventura's house. Barr described it as one 'which bespeaks him to have been a handsome and benevolent man, possessing much firmness and decision of character, tempered with mildness. He wore, at the time it was taken, a uniform similar to that of our horse-artillery and was decorated with two orders; one, the "Legion of Honor," and other, the "Bright Star of the Punjab" lately instituted by Runjeet Singh. ****************************** P.B. Avitable (1791 - 1850) Paolo di Bartolomeo Avitable was born on 25 October 1791 at Angerola near Naples. He joined the army while still in his teens and after a chequered career, blightened by the inability of his immediate superiors to recognize his special talents, he chose to emigrate westwards. Shipwrecked of Marseilles, he turned volte face and set his sights for service in the East.Whether he achieved in Persia, where he served before moving to India, the various distinctions he claimed in later years cannot be confirmed but the rewards were neither remunerative enough nor frequent enough to hold Avitable. Encouraged by Ventura, Avitable and Court moved to Punjab in 1827 and obtained employment with Ranjit Singh. Avitable displayed a marked ability for civil administration and was accordingly appointed Governor of Wazirabad in December 1829. After Ranjit Singh's death, Avitable's ability to subjugate a difficult outpost was wll recognized by everyone at the centre of Sikh politics in Lahore....Avitable was relieved in April 1843 and, after selling everything he could, he left for Simla immediately after Maharaja Sher Singh;s murder. A rebuff from senior Government officials in Simla did little to dampen the enthusiasm with which the 'dignified and courtely old man' - as one Calcutta newspaper described the tyrant of Peshawar - was greeted by the curious ladies of Calcutta. He returned to Naples, where he was feted by the King, he moved on to Paris to be received in audience by King Louis Philippe; then he crossed the Channel for a banquet given in his honor in London by the grateful East India Company, and was granted a private interview with the Duke of Wellington 'to whom he confided much, till then unknown, information regarding Afghan affairs.' Avitable retired to Agerola near Naples, his birthplace, and was soon married to a young niece by his scheming relatives, keen on sharing his spoils. Before long, however, the bride and her lawyer paramour was able to accomplish a feat the fierce Kurds in Persia, the Sikhs in Wazirabad, and the Peshawari Pathans had all admitted was impossible. The aging General was disposed of silently, it was rumoured, from the combined effects of poisoned meal and asphyxiation in a gas-filled room. He died in March 1850, aged fifty nine. **************************************** J. B. Ventura (? - 1858) An Italian by birth, Jean Baptiste Ventura all but adopted French nationality. He was conscripted into the Italian contingent raised to assist Napolean; he served with the French forces in Russia in 1812 and later fought in the decisive Battle of Waterloo. Like his companion Allard, Ventura gravitated eastwards to India and entered Ranjit Singh's service in 1822. He was given command of the Sikh infantry and earned the Maharaja's admiration soon afterwards by his valiant contributions to the Sikh success at the Battle of Nowshera in March 1823..... Ranjit Singh gave official recognition to his special consideration for Ventura by investing him with the title 'Faithful and Devoted' and had the credential proclaimed 'all over his dominions'.... Ventura, on hearing of Ranjit Singh's illness, hurried back to lahore. Posted to Peshawar, he was recalled to Lahore in 1839, on Ranjit Singh's death....Ventura retired in comfort, one of the few of Ranjit Singh's mercenaries to do so, and died in France on 3 April 1858. *************************************** H.C. Van Cortlandt (1814 - 1888) Enrolled at the age of eighteen years immediately after he returned to India from his education in England, Henry Charles Van Cortlandt joined Ranjit Singh's service in 1832. He was given charge of one Muslim battalion, and later on of two. Described by Henry Lawrence as 'weak and submissive (and) not likely to create a disturbance, but still less likely to quell one,' Van Cortlandt maintained himself with a commendable bravery - with the British as a political assistant during the first Sikh War and, immediately after, with the Sikhs. In 1844, he was in command of two infantry regiments of ten guns, comprising Sikhs and Hindus. After the war he was promoted from the rank of Colonel to that of General and appointed Governor of Dera Ismail Khan. Back again on the side of the British during the seige of Multan, he was of help to Herbert Edwardes but was not rewarded according to his expectations. He remained on active service through the Mutiny of 1857, and retired as Commissioner of Multan. Henry Van Cortlandt died in London on 15 March 1888. ****************************************** F.H. Mouton (1804 - 1876) Francis Henry Mouton was thirty four years old when he applied to General Ventura in 1838 and was selected to join Ranjit Singh's cavalry. He travelled from Alexandria to Bombay with his wife and accompanied by General Ventura, a shawl merchant and Dr Honigberger. Ventura preceded the party to Lahore, and left Dr Honigberger to escort the rest, as he alone among the travellers could speak the language. Mouton's initial tenure of service was for three years, and this was afterwards extended. He escaped being murdered by muttinying Sikh troops, owing his life to the presence of mind of his wife. He served in Mandi and Kulu, and in 1844 he returned for a while to France but made his way back to Lahore to fight for the SIkhs at Ferozeshah in December 1845, and Sobraon in February 1846. He was deported by the British in July 1846, but irrepresible by temperament, he soon obtained a legitimate commission in the French army with the rank of a Colonel. Mouton was decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1858, and after serving in the Crimea, was retired at the age of sixty one. He died eleven years later in November 1876 in sunny Algiers. ********************************* Dr Martin Honigberger Originally from the town of Kronstadt in Transylavania (now Rumania), Dr Honigberger, compelled by a 'secret impulse, an inward voice', left his home in 1815 for the East. His journeys through most of the countries of the Middle East, Russia and India were recollected by him on his return in 1850 in a fascinating memoir published two years later. Of immediate interest is the account he left of the two periods he spent at Lahore between 1829-1833 and 1839-1849. On the first occassion, it was while he was in Baghdad that he heard of the employment of General Ventura, Allard, Court and Avitable in Ranjit Singh's service, and the vacancies for European doctors in the Sikh army....He left armed with letters of introduction to the European Generals and landed at Bender-Karatshi (Karachi) in February 1829....From Multan, Honigberger and his servant rode on horseback to Lahore, reaching there within two months of leaving Karachi. Whiling away his time by attending assorted patients, including, successfully, Archilles, the son of General Allard and unsuccessfully, one of the dray horses brought by Alexander Burnes as a gift for Ranjit Singh from the King of England, Honigberger in 1831 encountered both Burnes and Jacquemont....The latter spoke of him as 'a Transylvanian doctor who for the last 17 years has been wondering about Asia, seeking his fortune; he talks shortly of retiring to his country by a route which he would have no chance of finding if he had not used it before; but I fear this is because he has given up all hope of ever finding it. His name is Martin Honigberger, and he speaks Italian, Turkish and Persian fluently, while his written Latin which I have seen, is not bad. He is very devoted to his profession and it is the chief object of his life. One would call him a good surgeon and he appears to me to be well versed in Oriental Materia Medica as well as our own. He is so familiar with the languages and customs of the Ea st that he came by land from Indus to Lahore that he stayed a fortnight in the city without anyone suspecting that he was European. A more pleasant occassion he preferred to recall was the visit of the painter August Schoefft. Another visitor, the Russian prince Alexis Soltyoff, who met Hongberger in March 1842, wrote of him as 'a German doctor at Sher Singh's court, with a largest beard you ever saw, and gold satin uniform trimmed with silver. His name is Honigberger, and he has just sold me a Lahore violin and a panorama of Lahore done by a local artist.' ***************************** C.A. Court (1739 - 1861) A Frenchman by birth, a soldier by profession and 'a gentleman and a savant' by choice, Claude Auguste Court was born in Grasse, in the south of France, on 26 September 1793. He joined the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1812 and was commissioned a year later as sub-lieutenant. After seeing some active service in Napolean's forces, he resigned in July 1818 and found employment in Persia. Avitable was also serving there and so the admission of Court into Ranjit Singh's army through the recommendation of Avitable did not pose an insuperable difficulty. Court was presented by Avitable to the Mahraja, who soon entrusted the artillery to his latest recruit. Court applied himself with creative diligence to the manufacture of guns with the result that on a gun cast in 1830 and christened Lelan he was commemorated in the inscription on it as 'possessing wisdom like Aristotle, the Plato of the age.' Alexander Burnes, a little later, was more conservative but generous in his assessment of Court: 'M. Court struck me as an acute and well informed person.' ***************************** August Schoefft Of all the numerous enduring images of the peacock splendour of the Sikh Darbar, none - not even the contemporary miniature paintings of that period, nor the pen-portraits left behind by writers such as William Osborne or his aunt, Miss Emily Eden, or G.T. Vigne or Dr Matin Honigberger - can match the sweeping flourish with which the painter August Theodor Schoefft (1809 - 1888) brought to life on a single canvas the hierarchy which was responsible for the establishment of the Sikh State in the Punjab, and also for its ultimate disintegration. After leaving the Punjab, Schoefft returned to Europe through Afghanistan, Persia and Egypt. Whether he took his copies and notes with him to Europe or had them transported there by his wife, who must have returned to Europe separately, it is not known. It is certain, though, that at some time before 1852, when he was, according to Dr Honigberger, in St. Petersburg, Russia, he completed his tour de force - the painting of the Sikh Darbar in Lahore. Schoefft's prime resources remained his notes, aided by the memory and the imagination of a more mature artist. He retrieved from the crevices of his conscious recollection and sub-conscious impressions a glittering image of the Sikhs as they would have wished to be remembered - as 'a fine looking set of men'. What Osborne had put in words, Schoefft procceded to illustrate in oils. The specific site in the Fort chosen by Schoefft to serve as a backcloth (for his painting) was the small rectangular enclosure between the Khilat Khana on its eastern side and the Summan Burj, which contained the Royal sleeping apartments, on its western side. This had been used regularly by the courtiers as a point of assembly while they waited for the Maharaja to emerge from the Summan Burj to take his place in the baradari for the initial audience of the day. Dividing the substantial canvas into manageable segments, five basic groupings of the principle characters emerge. The first, placed in the centre of the baradari, contains Maharaja Ranjit Singh, seated with his immediate legitimate relations and their spiritual confidants. At their feet but standing upright is the group, dominated by the Dogra family - Raja Dhian Singh, Wazir to both Ranjit Singh and Sher Singh but uncharacteristically ignoring both masters; Raja Suchet Singh, the youngest brother and rival in fashion to Sher Singh; and the young boy favourite, Hira Singh, who in an unlikely gesture of rapport returns Sher Singh's left-handed salutation. In their shadows hover Fakir Azizuddin (Ranjit Singh's Foreign Minister), Dina Nath who controlled the Royal Exchequer, and Lal Singh, soon to replace Dhian Singh as Wazir. To the left in a third group stands Ajit Singh, scornfully turning his back on his Dogra rivals. He stares fixedly at his victim Sher Singh. Before him stand the Muslim Governor of Peshawar and his sons, and the vanquished Nawab Zulfiqar Khan of Multan. Also looking up at Sher Singh is his medical attendant, Dr Hongberger, besides whom stand Mouton, De la Roche and De la Font. Sher Singh's younger son Pratap Singh rides behind him, and shadowing the child is his assassin, Lehna Singh. Returning to the baradari, in the right hand section (of the painting) one sees the fourth group which includes more European mercenaries - Allard, Avitable, Ventura, Foulkes, Steinbach and Van Cortlandt. Seated before them are Sham Singh Attariwala and the fakir, Haridas, who taxes the composure of his neighbour Fakir Nuruddin (physician to Ranjit Singh). Outside the baradari, collected in a horizontal fifth composition, are General Court, the inebriated Meka Singh, Bhai Gurmukh Singh, Attar Singh Sindhanwalia, and Misr Beli Ram (keeper of the Royal toshakhana) preceded by his assistant. Schoefft executed a second composition showing Ranjit Singh listening to the Granth being read to him at Amritsar. Ranjit Singh is depicted seated on a large cushion, wearing the Kohinoor in an amulet on his right arm. Besides him sit the bhais or priests, who, in addition to the immediate members of his family and his favourite Raja Hira Singh, were the only ones accorded the privilege of sitting in his presence. The figure seated immdiately behind the Maharaja is Kharak Singh, and standing besides him, partially blocked by an Akali, stands Sher Singh. The young child who holds up a hawk in the right foreground is of interest. This child was depicted running ahead of Sher Singh's horse in the Darbar picture and appears again in the far right corner of the sketch of Sher Singh in Council. This little gambolling figure is not Dalip Singh but the son of one of Ranjit Singh's sardars who had fallen in battle. ************************************************************* |
 | History - " Prominent Eur... (Preet Mohan S Ahluwalia - 13.Jan.00) |
