Lot Details
Lot 373
Carved Alabaster Orientalist Figure Entitled 'Hindu Girl Placing Her Lamp Upon the Ganges'
Joseph Gott, Second quarter 19th century
Sculpted semi-nude and in a kneeling pose and gazing upward. Signed J. GOTT FT, height 22 1/2 inches.
Provenance:
Benjamin Rawson, Nidd Hall, North Yorkshire, England.
Christie's, London, The Nineteenth Century, September 28, 1989, lot 282.
Exhibited:
Leeds & Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Joseph Gott 1786-1860 Sculptor, 1972, no. 48, illus. pl. 35.
Benjamin Rawson (d. 1844), the original owner of this work, was a wealthy wool merchant, who commissioned this sculpture as part of a larger commission of works by the prominent local sculptor Joseph Gott (1786-1860). The sculptures were incorporated into the decorative scheme of Rawson's 4,000-acre county estate, Nidd Hall, in the village of Nidd, in North Yorkshire, England, which he acquired in 1824 and rebuilt in 1825. The subject of this sculpture is derived from the romantic work Lalla Rookh by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, published in 1817. It depicts a passage from the first of the four poems in the tale, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, where the heroine, Lalla Rookh, daughter of the 17th-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, is at the river just after dusk: 'As they passed along a sequestered river after sunset, they saw a young Hindu girl upon the bank ... She had lighted a small lamp ... had committed it with a trembling hand to the stream and was now anxiously watching its progress down the current ...'.
C
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