Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan's collection of Indian and Persian paintings to sell at Christie's for more than £8m

Next month in London, Christie’s will sell 95 Indian and Persian paintings from the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan. With estimates ranging from £2,000 to £1m, it is expected to sell for in excess of £8m on 28 October.

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.

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, “indicating that they were gifts given by and to each other” says Sara Plumbly, Christie’s head of Islamic and Indian art.

Plumbly points out that, in his catalogue introduction to the 1998 British Museum exhibition Princes, Poets and Paladins, the collector and academic Stuart Cary Welch wrote that visitors to Prince Sadruddin’s home were “struck by his penchant for the happy and lyrical”, qualities that Plumbly says are reflected in this collection: “Many paintings relate to gardens and flowers, others to animals, the natural world and people.”

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. “This was a period when a wealth of material was available on the market from the great collections of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Plumbly says, listing that of Baron Maurice de Rothschild among many others.

Plumbly describes this is a “once in a generation” sale. “In terms of other collections of Indian paintings—though very different in nature—in October 2023 we had the auction of An Eye Enchanted: Indian Paintings from the Collection of Toby Falk. That comprised over 150 paintings from the collection of the respected late scholar Toby Falk who left a lasting legacy in our field.” The auction made £2.8m [with fees], though Plumby notes the works in the Falk sale “were both far more modest in nature and lesser known – many hadn’t been published and exhibited in the way that these have.”

She picks out three particular highlights from the Aga Khan sale. First, Eight Horse Merchants, from the Fraser Album, a series of paintings which depict life in early 19th century Delhi, accumulated by two Scotsmen serving in India, William Fraser and his brother James Baillie Fraser. “The pages we have exemplify the very best of the album—rich in detail, character and atmosphere, they capture the essence of the Fraser Album,” Plumbly says. “It includes all the album has to offer—single figure studies, dancing girls, village scenes, and well-knit groups of figures. They’ve been described by some as ‘photography before the camera was invented’.”

Second, an early Mughal painting of a Family of Cheetahs (est £700,000-£1m), one of the earliest natural history studies known to exist and attributed by scholars to Basawan, one of the Emperor Akbar’s favourite artists. “It 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 Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva and has been esteemed by art historians for several decades,” Plumbly says.

Finally, Plumbly picks out a painting of A Prince Hawking, the poster image for the British Museum Princes, Poets and Paladins exhibition (est £700,000-£1m) and previously in the collection of Baron Maurice de Rothschild. “It 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,” Plumbly says. Cary Welch wrote of the work that it depicted “a most ornamental huntsman astride a Nijinsky of a horse”.

The collection is not currently guaranteed and Plumbly anticipates interest to come from India and more internationally. “The market for Indian and Persian paintings generally is strong, with Indian paintings in particular in very high demand at the moment,” she says, pointing to the example of a heavily illustrated late Mughal copy of the Shahnama of Fidawsi which sold at Christie’s London earlier this year for over £2m, against a pre-sale estimate £700,000 to £1m.

Plumbly adds that because of their long provenance, “these 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.”