It is thought the two Indian soldiers – Risaldar Jagat Singh and Risaldar Man Singh – died shortly after being sent from India to France to fight in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 – two months after they sat for the artist in Britain
A rare portrait of two First World War Indian soldiers thought to have been completed shortly before they fought at the Battle of the Somme is the subject of a race against time to stop it leaving Britain, reported inews.co.uk.
The unfinished painting by the Anglo-Hungarian portraitist Philip de Laszlo featuring a pair of Sikh cavalry officers from the British Indian Army represents a unique depiction by one of the most renowned high-society painters of his era of two “ordinary” soldiers from Britain’s colonial forces.
The work, which De Laszlo kept in his personal collection until his death in 1937, is now deemed to be at risk of leaving the UK and an appeal has been launched to raise the £650,000 needed to bequeath it to the nation. It is thought the two Indian soldiers – Risaldar Jagat Singh and Risaldar Man Singh – died shortly after being sent from India to France to fight in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 – two months after they sat for the artist in Britain.
But little is known of their lives or the details of their fate in the trenches. A temporary bar has been placed on the export of the work by the Department for Culture Media and Sport to allow an institution to secure the funds to purchase it.
It expires on 13 July. Experts said the painting, depicting the two junior troop commanders from the 150,000 British Indian Army Expeditionary Force sent from across the Empire to fight in Europe, was an important artefact of the often-forgotten role played in the war by ethnic minority soldiers from Britain’s colonial territories.
“This wonderful and sensitive portrait captures an important moment in our history as soldiers were drawn from across the globe to help fight in the trenches of the First World War. I hope this magnificent painting can remain in the UK to help tell the story of those brave soldiers and the contribution they and so many others made to Allied victory.”
— Lord Parkinson, Arts Minister
More than a million troops and labourers were transported to the battlefields of the First World War from Africa and Asia. Peter Barber, a member of the specialist committee that advises ministers on whether export bars are necessary, said: “This sensitive portrait… offers an exceptionally rare glimpse not of maharajahs or generals but of two ‘ordinary’ middle-ranking Sikh soldiers about to depart for the horrors of the Battle of the Somme.
“The enormous contribution made by them and millions of other Indians to Britain’s war effort between 1914 and 1918 has until recently been largely overlooked. Yet numerous descendants of Indian soldiers now live in Britain, rendering the portrait ‘British’ at several, increasingly significant, levels.”
De Laszlo, a Hungarian Jew who married a member of the Anglo-Irish Guinness dynasty and became a British subject in 1914, was much in demand in royal and aristocratic circles, as well as among industrialists, politicians and leading intellectuals, for his light-suffused works.
This makes the painting of the two Indian soldiers, seemingly undertaken without payment, particularly unusual. Barber said: “De Laszlo could well have seen parallels between the position of these outsiders loyally serving their imperial master and his own as a humbly born Hungarian Jew who had reinvented himself as a patriotic member of British high society.
Like the Indians serving in the British forces, he too faced discrimination in face of growing public xenophobia.” Shortly after completing the portrait, the painter was interned on suspicion of being a foreign agent on the basis that he had written letters to relatives in Austria. He was later exonerated but his incarceration left its mark, bringing him to the point of a nervous breakdown after the authorities refused him permission to paint while in detention.
The arts minister Lord Parkinson said: “This wonderful and sensitive portrait captures an important moment in our history as soldiers were drawn from across the globe to help fight in the trenches of the First World War. I hope this magnificent painting can remain in the UK to help tell the story of those brave soldiers and the contribution they and so many others made to Allied victory.”
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