Album of Maharaja Duleep Singh fetches £22,000 in UK

London, October 1

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A collection of rare photographs of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire Duleep Singh went under the hammer in Britain for a whopping 22,000 pounds, 22 times higher than the expected price, recently.

One of the albums, having 240 photos four of which are of Singh's, opens with his original picture which was taken while he was a guest of Queen Victoria at Obsorne House 1854.

It is believed that the photographer was the Queen's husband Prince Albert, a close friend of the Indian royal.

C and T Auctioneers had put up the "Personal Photograph Albums of Sir John Spencer Login (1809-1863) and the Login Family" for sale at a guide price between 200 and 400 pounds.

"It was very much a surprise. We had expected the bid may go up to 1,000 pounds but in the end it was nearly 22 times.

The album was bought by a collector who knew exactly what he was buying and acquired it for a number of previously unpublished photographs of the maharaja and others," Glen Chapman of C and T Auctioneers said.

The collector, believed to be of Indian descent, went head to head with another buyer at the auction in England's Kent.

"It was a lot about pride and auction fever. Neither wanted to back down, which was good for us," added Chapman.

The set of four Victorian era albums have a total of 240 photographs, including the one of Duleep Singh from Osborne House, Queen Victoria's royal residence.

There is only one other known print of that which still hangs at Osborne House in the Isle of Wight, an island in the English Channel.

Some images were taken at Castle Menzies, which the Login family had leased for Maharajah Duleep Singh, and one of the photos in the album shows him with the Login family at the castle.

Towards the back of one of the albums is a sketch, said to be the maharaja's first drawing of Mussoorie in 1853.

Sir John Spencer Login, a naval surgeon who worked for the East India Company, was appointed Duleep Singh's tutor when he was aged five. When the British won the Anglo-Sikh War in 1849 and annexed Punjab, the prince was put into the care of Sir John and later exiled to England.

Duleep Singh soon developed a close friendship with Queen Victoria and her husband, and spent time with the royal couple and their children in the Isle of Wight when he was 17.

He later bought a 17,000 acre country estate at Elveden in Norfolk in the east of England, where he lived with his wife Maharani Bamba and their six children.

The leather-bound set of albums, which was discovered by accident during a house clearing, also contain images of a young King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales.

One album contains mostly pressed flowers collected in the 1850s in Scotland. The last album in the group dates back to 1860s and consists of a number of images of the Login family and other members of the gentry of the period. — PTI