A glimpse from history: Francesco Renaldis 1789 painting of a Bibi of Dacca................ Francesco Renaldi (1755-1799) was an English-born painter of Italian heritage about whose life, little is known. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1776, aged twenty-one. In 1785, perhaps frustrated by commercial sluggishness, even sensing the prospect of professional failure in a highly competitive metropolitan market for portraits, Renaldi applied to the East India Company for permission to travel to Bengal. He supplied the names and addresses of two guarantors—Mr. Job Hart Price of Aldershot House, and Robert Codd of the 59th Regiment of Foot. These sureties were obviously acceptable to the company, because the following February Renaldi was given formal approval to go. He sailed aboard the Hillsborough, and reached Calcutta in August 1786. For ten years Renaldi lived in Calcutta, Lucknow (working, it is believed, for Asaf ud-Daulah, the Nawab Wazir of Oudh), and in Dacca (now the capital city of Bangladesh). He was therefore one of only a relatively small number of European painters who spent extended periods painting portraits of and for the Nabobs (English, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish gentlemen of the East India Company whose tendency was to “go native”) and their more or less official Indian mistresses, or Bibis. This painting is a fine example of the latter. This portrait represents a young Muslim Bibi reclining on an expensive carpet, propped up on a plump cushion in a corner of her small, private house, known as a Bibi Khana. She contemplates the elaborate jewel in her left hand, probably a pendant necklace. By her side there are a few other beautiful objects—the hookah; the paandaan, or silver tray with cruets containing a soporific preparation made from betel-leaf, and her casually discarded jutis, or slippers with the elaborately upturned toes. The fine, layered formal costume consists of a fine peshwaz or kurta (a kind of loose shirt or tunic) with an inner layer made of gold brocade patterned with buti, a design of orange and green. Her peshwaz has a fine white gauze veil. The dupatta, meanwhile, a double-sided scarf or shawl, is made of fine, dusty rose muslin edged with silver-threaded gota, or ribbon. The jewelry is delicate and plentiful, and includes several necklaces, numerous bracelets, large earrings, a wide slender hooped nose-ring, rather heavy anklets, and gold rings on all of her toes, and on most of her fingers (some sporting substantial gemstones). Judging from the angle of the shadows cast by the shutters on the left, this scene evidently takes place in the late afternoon, that hottest and most oppressive time of the equatorial day—the sun never sets much earlier than approximately 5.45 p.m. (in January) or later than about 7.00 (in August). In the post-colonial context, one is tempted to interpret this Bibi’s focused gaze towards that fine jewel as a sort of rumination upon her own standing as an item of great luxury, a rare commodity, installed for the nabob’s pleasure upon the periphery of Anglo-Indian society in the time of Warren Hastings. However, it is worth noting that very often the relationship between Nabob and Bibi was lasting, respectful if not sincerely affectionate, and sometimes involved the eventual bequest of substantial property (i.e. from Nabob to Bibi). And despite their unofficial domestic status and the impossibility of marriage, Bibis could nevertheless be quite comfortably accepted (on both sides of the racial divide) as being of “good family.” Indeed, some were even minor members of the princely houses. Unfortunately we know nothing at all about the identity of this particular Bibi, nor indeed the Nabob for whom Renaldi painted her portrait. According to an inscription, it was painted at Dacca in 1789.
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 08:48:19 +0000