Equine artist has a picture perfect royal Jaipur trip
MADELEINE BUNBURY PAINTS HORSES BELONGING TO THE MAHARAJAH
MADELEINE BUNBURY, a British equestrian artist, has told Eastern Eye she had “the most amazing fun ever” spending a month in Rajasthan painting polo horses belonging to the Maharajah of Jaipur.
Padmanabh Singh, who is 24, inherited his title when he was only 12 and is now said to be one of India’s best polo players.
He looks the part of the dashing Indian prince and features regularly in glossy magazines in India and in the west.
He escorted Hollywood actress Reese Witherspoon’s daughter Ava Phillippe to the Bal des Debutantes in Paris in 2017.
And in the world of polo, where it seems everyone knows everyone else, there have long been close links between the British and Jaipur royal families.
The artist, who has been compared with George Stubbs, the English master famed for his paintings of horses, will have an exhibition of her work at the Osborne Studio Gallery in London’s Belgravia from October 11-29, 2022. She got the prestigious Jaipur royal commission through the recommendation of a friend of a friend.
Madeleine explained the Maharajah’s cousin, Dhruv Singh, is a frequent visitor to London. “He lived and worked in London. And so he met other polo playing friends here. And it was one friend that we’ve had in common who recommended me for those paintings.”
And it was Dhruv who compared her with Stubbs when they were all having a chat with the Maharajah, who is known in polo circles by his nickname, “Pacho”.
Legally, India doesn’t have any Maharajahs since prime minister Indira Gandhi abolished royal titles on December 28, 1971, through the 26th amendment to the Indian constitution.
However, Indian society at large and certainly the erstwhile subjects of the Maharajahs continue to pay due respect to those of royal descent. Padmanabh inherited his title from his maternal grandfather, Bhawani Singh, who was the son of Man Singh II, the last ruling Maharajah of the princely state of Jaipur during the British Raj.
Upon the death of his father on June 24, 1970, Bhawani Singh succeeded him only to lose the title just over a year later.
The problem for Bhawani Singh was that he and his wife, Princess Padmini Devi of Sirmur, who had married in 1966, produced no male heir but a daughter, Diya Kumar, in 1971. Her husband, Narendra Kumar, whom Diya secretly married in 1998 and divorced in 2018, was a commoner and therefore ruled out of contention when it came to the succession.
Diya and Narendra had three children, of whom the eldest, Padmanabh, was born on July 2, 1998. At the age of five, he was adopted as his grandfather’s heir and at 12, became the Maharajah when Bhawani
Singh died in 2011.
Padmanabh was given a suitable education, with a spell at Millfield, a top British public school in Somerset, and at Mayo College in Ajmer. He has been enrolled at Università e Nobil Collegio Sant’Eligio in Rome since 2018 to pursue a degree in cultural heritage management while also taking Italian language and art history courses.
Madeleine St Pierre Bunbury was born in Mustique in the Caribbean in 1997, went to school in Dorset and received classical Old Master training at Charles Cecil School in Florence.
“It’s all very traditional with all the old masters’ techniques,” she said of her three years in Florence.
She now uses “the same sort of equipment, the same types of paint, the same batch of brushes”.
She recalled: “I started off with painting human portraits. And I decided, never again; I only like horses. People never have time to pose; horses have all day long to stand for me. As soon as I left art school, really, I knew it was only going to be horses.”
She took everything she needed, including delicate canvases, oil paints and brushes, to Jaipur.
She was almost barred from taking the canvases as cabin baggage even though they were rolled up. “I carried them all the way. Luckily, as soon as I landed in Delhi, there were masses of people willing to help me carry them. I had a whole suitcase filled with the paints and the turpentine and all the correct brushes.”
Three of the paintings she did were almost life size, three metres by two. A fourth was smaller.
The Maharajah’s horse, “Music”, an English thoroughbred which had been exported from England where it had probably been a race horse, “was the one that was really important”. It was a bay with one sock on a hind leg.
She said: “Music was a very good model. Stood still.”
“Nukra”, used for weddings and the arrival of the groom, was another horse that she painted.
Madeleine had arrived in March, in time to witness the spring festival of Holi. “They were just the most hospitable people in the world. I was totally looked after. I stayed in a very nice hotel belonging to one of their friends. It was close to the polo field because that’s where I was painting every day.”
Even though it wasn’t the height of summer, it was “just baking in the Rajasthan desert sun”. There was a daily routine that she followed. “I’d have the horse come out for one hour, maybe two hours. And afterwards I would work on the background for two hours.
And with the big painting, I had to leave it in the polo clubhouse. And then three men would have to carry the big canvas all the way across the polo field to set up at the stables every day. And the sun was like melting the paint and the wind was blowing the sand on the canvas. And it was just a lot to think about. Every day for 10 days. I had to do the same routine.”
“Luckily, every time I had assistance,” she said. “One groom would hold the horse and the other groom was there with a fan to get all the flies off the horse. So I had all the help in the world. Brilliant.
“Obviously, I love the horses. But, in fact, I hardly touched the horses because the grooms were all in charge.” She was well looked after. “It was my first trip to India. I loved it. Really incredible country. We had a lot of socialising, parties, parties. There were so many people; lots of Europeans and Americans had come over for the Holi festival. In between painting, I was very busy going out. I’m going back again in March to paint more horses for other people.”