Brushing With Fate

For the sheer range of 19th-century subjects depicted, the itinerant oil painter August Schoefft has no equal. His staggering portfolio of portraits includes a Russian emperor, the last Mughal Emperor, a Sikh King bedecked with the Koh-i-Noor, members of the robber-murderer cult of Thugees, the Kashmiri wife of a European mercenary and Native American Indians. With an astonishingly quick brush Schoefft captured them, and a host of landscapes, with an almost photographic realism.

Lured east by the promise of the picturesque and exotic, Schoefft left his sleepy studio in Budapest to paint his way through Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. He reached India in 1838 and royal patronage soon followed. He narrowly escaped death in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar when a commission went disastrously wrong. He later enacted an artist's revenge on the temple guardians, who had mistaken his brush for a sacrilegious cigar, in a brilliantly conceived work.

In London and elsewhere, Victorian audiences flocked to see his masterly study of the Court of Lahore, which featured over 100 personalities. Critical acclaim propelled him to international fame and further adventures in Mexico, the US and Russia.