Lofty allegory and base reality - two painted "crowd scenes"

Alegoria às virtudes do Príncipe Regente D. João, by Domingos Antonio Sequeira, circa 1810.

João VI of Portugal (13 May 1767, Lisbon - 10 March 1826, Lisbon), Prince Regent of Portugal (1799–1816) and King of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves (1816–1826). João was the second son of Queen Maria I and Pedro III of Portugal and became heir to the crown when his elder brother José died in 1788. In 1785 he married Carlota Joaquina, the daughter of the Spanish king Carlos V. After the death of his father in 1786 and the onset of his mother's mental illness, João took the government in his hands in 1792, being officially declared regent in 1799. With the invasion of Portugal by Napoleon Bonaparte's troops in 1807, he embarked with the royal family and his court for Brazil where he chose Rio de Janeiro as the seat of his government. Among his first reforms was the opening of Brazilian ports to international trade, which brought immense changes and prosperity to the colony. And the presence of the court and the refugee Portuguese elite contributed to the development of a luxury trade and much new building.

Dom João soon adjusted to the Brazilian environment and came to be very comfortable in his New World exile. So in 1815, when Bonaparte was defeated in Europe and the royal family were expected to return immediately to Portugal, The Prince Regent preferred to stay in Brazil. The following year, at his mother's death, he became King João VI. The rumblings of Brazilian independence were put down in 1817, and three years later the King was warned of the imminence of revolution in Portugal and the urgent need for his return. But, receiving differing views form his advisers, he delayed his return. Only after much more discussion and a violent attempt at a coup in Rio de Janiero, did the court finally sail for Portugal in the spring of 1821.

Arriving home to a changed political environment, he was forced to swear loyalty to a new constitution. And the following year his elder son, Pedro, who had remained in Brazil, led a revolution to declare that country's independence, and promptly declared himself Emperor of Brazil. During his last few years he endured constant political and family intrigue, most of it instigated by his Spanish-born wife and his younger son, Miguel, both of whom tried to force his abdication along with the restoration of an absolutist regime; the latter was accomplished but not the former. But he died suddenly at the age of fifty-eight, only five years after returning to Portugal. In the 1990s, tests were taken on his exhumed internal organs; analysis of his heart tissue detected enough arsenic to kill two people.

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Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, by Johan Zoffany, 1785-86.

This crowded painting, teeming with approximately ninety figures, both Indian and European, shows a cock-fight involving birds belonging to Asaf-ud-Daula, the Nawab Wazir (governor) of Awadh and those belonging to Colonel John Mordaunt, an employee of Britain’s East India Company. Asaf, the figure standing at the center, appears to have jumped from his seat to bet with Mordaunt, who gestures to his own bird. In the multitude of figures surrounding them, some can be identified by name. Between the two main protagonists stands Salar Jung, the Nawab’s uncle, calculating the bet on his fingers. Behind Salar Jung, in brightly colored clothes, are Asaf’s chief ministers, Hasan Reza Khan – also the homosexual Asaf’s favourite - and Haidar Ali Khan. Claude Martin, wearing a red uniform and sitting on the white settee on the right, was a French-born defector to the East India Company. He supervised the Nawab’s arsenal and was a friend of the painter. Zoffany himself sits with his arm over a chair in the right background, dressed in white like Mordaunt, pencil in hand. Standing next to him is Ozias Humphry, another artist who had come from Britain in search of new opportunities. At top right in the red coat is Antoine Polier, a Swiss-born engineer at the Nawab’s court. Below him, with a hookah, is John Wombwell, the East India Company’s paymaster at Lucknow. Standing at bottom right holding a white bird is Robert Gregory, the assistant to the Governor-General’s representative; Gregory was reportedly cut out of his father’s will for cock-fighting. (Even then, cock-fighting was widely disapproved of in England.) The pudgy fellow in white, in conversation with Gregory, is Lieutenant Golding of the East India Company’s Corp of Engineers. (Golding was not actually present at the cock-fight but stood in for another similarly chubby European who had been there, but who refused to sit for the picture.)

The painting was commissioned in 1784 by Warren Hastings, First Governor-General of Bengal shortly before his return to England; Hastings is not included in the scene but is recorded as having attended one of Mordaunt’s cock-fights that same year. Asaf’s court at Lucknow was the most extravagant of the native courts and attracted European adventurers with its promise of financial gain and its exotic lifestyle. Asaf’s “natural inclinations and attachments were for low, ill-born and base-minded associates […] He delighted in meaningless amusements and was immensely pleased with anyone who indulged in filthy language; and the more obscene the conversation was in any company; the better he was pleased.” Mordaunt, the illegitimate and nearly illiterate son of the Earl of Peterborough, was a particular favorite, serving as commander of the Nawab’s bodyguard and director of court amusements, including cock-fights.

The painting has drawn much critical debate over the years. At Lucknow, Indians and Europeans appeared to enjoy social equality, with the latter often having Indian wives and children. But the painting may be making a sly criticism of the licentiousness of those surrounding the titular leader of Awadh. The draperies swirling about the Nawab’s groin have been interpreted as indicating that he was sexually aroused, a depiction which would have been intended to mock him. And a vignette at the center of the composition shows a young Muslim boy in pink being publicly groped by a Hindu man, while a nearby spectator is being restraind from expressing his indignation at this. But the Europeans, though depicted in a more “gentlemanly” manner, are nonetheless shown as active participants in this “low” diversion. So, whether the resulting image is a commentary on the libertinism of the Anglo-Indian elite, or merely an attempt to ridicule the Indians and thereby assert European superiority, remains a matter of interpretation.