Page 261 - Eye of the beholder

For a historically important picture like this, the provenance is important for the credibility of the discovery. In this context therefore, the name of Abbott&Holder adds significance to the discovery. Located in Museum Street in London, the reputable gallery has been in business since 1936, with a founding policy ‘to stock pictures that are within the means of as broad a section of the population as possible’. Currently housed on four floors at Museum street, just opposite the British Museum, and having their own paper conservation studio, the gallery still aims to provide affordable pictures with accurate attributions, and a guarantee that ‘should an attribution prove inaccurate, we still offer not only a complete refund, but also, as offered on the first list, a box of black magic chocolates by the way of compensation’.
In October 2010, a few days after I had won the picture at auction, and exactly 218 years and 1 month after Thomas Daniell had finished drawing ‘At Mugwaukul’, the picture was delivered to my home in Switzerland. I had been waiting to lay my hands on it impatiently since the time I had won it at auction. The provenance and the attribution by the auctioneers had left no doubt that it was an original work by Thomas Daniell. But as they say, seeing is believing! I had previously seen images of equivalent works by the Daniells in high resolution. There were also some originals from the collection of the Victoria Memorial and from the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi that I had had a chance to see earlier. Armed with this experience and the attribution, one look at the picture left no doubt that the provenance and the attribution were correct beyond the slightest doubt.
The only mystery that prevailed was regarding the date and the subject matter of the painting. The painting did not appear as an aquatint in any of the books published by the Daniells. An aquatint of the same subject would have made the painting much more valuable, and would have made me lucky a second time (See chapter XX). Since the painting did not feature in any of the publications, I started looking for any mention of it in the various catalogs of Daniell paintings that have been published so far. After all, there was some likelihood that in the last 218 years of the painting’s history, it may have been exhibited somewhere and thereby made its way into some catalog. There have been many catalogs of Daniell’s works that have been published. Most of them were limited edition publications that are very difficult to get hold of now. From the few that I could access, I found no mention of the painting I had at hand.
The date of 17 September 1792 indicated that the painting was done during their second journey through south India. A comparison against Oriental Scenery and against the journal kept by William Daniell indicated that at this time the Daniells were in the area around Tanjore. However, there was no known place by the name of ‘Mugwaukul’ to be found in the area around Tanjore, or for that matter anywhere in the rest of India. The situation strongly indicated that ‘Mugwaukul’ was a deviant form of the name of some other place in South India. It is a well established fact that the names of various places as used by the Daniells are sometimes quite different from what they appear now. However, in the absence of any clue regarding the name and location of the place, the search for the name of the location the painting depicts remained futile for some time.
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