At a time when Indian artists are beginning to warm up the international art market, comes a story of a princely Indian connection to a discovery in British art.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s grandson, Frederick, has been identified as a patron of the arts, and a collector of a series of priceless English oil paintings that have been gathering dust in a small county town north-east of London.

Prince Frederick Singh, educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge, was the younger son of Ranjit Singh’s son and heir, Duleep Singh, and his German-Ethiopian wife Bamba Muller. His brothers Victor and Edward pre-deceased him. One older sister, Bamba Jindan, married a Dr Sutherland and was allowed by the Pakistani government to return to Lahore where she died in 1957.

Unlike his father who rejected the Christian vows of his pre-teen years and returned to Sikhism, just as he denounced his English patrons prior to a series of failed attempts to return home for good to India, Frederick lived and died the life of a perfect English gentleman.

A portrait capturing his likeness shortly before he died at the age of 58 in 1926 depicts an Edwardian gentleman in a bowler hat with a twirling moustache and a stiff collared shirt with a tie. He could easily pass for an upper class gentleman visiting the Baker Street apartment of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional hero, Sherlock Holmes.

A much earlier portrait of the young Frederick identifies him more clearly as a young Sikh boy with long flowing hair and the features of his father and grandfather.

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