Painting

The strikingly decorated borders on this album page are very close in style to those in albums that belonged to the Swiss-French engineer and collector Colonel Antoine Polier, and this page may also have been done for him. Most of his albums are now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. Polier was a well known figure in the late 18th-century, working in the Indian province of Awadh and in Delhi. He worked at different times for the English East India Company and for the Nawab of Awadh. The painting is in the style of Mihr Chand, one of the foremost Awadhi artists of the time.