KRISHNA SPYING ON RADHA'S TOILETTE PROPERTY FROM THE LATE EUSTACE HOPE CORNELIUS (1925 - 2005) Provincial Pahari school, Northern India, late 19th century Opaque pigments heightened with gold on paper, the vertical composition depicting in the background near the entrance of a palatial courtyard Lord Krishna shyly spying on Radha applying her make up, specifically her bindu, surrounded by her maidens and attendants, the ladies colourfully dressed, typical architectural white chhajjas in the high background and hilly landscape on the horizon, the scene set inside floral borders with stylised white rosettes and gold leaves, the back with a preparatory pencil drawing of Shiva and Parvati, mounted on a golden cardboard frame, 31.4cm x 26.8cm including the frame. Provenance: from the late Eustace Hope Cornelius' private collection (1925 - 2005), former librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, in the UK since the early 1930s. A long-time MLA member, Eustace Hope Cornelius (d. 11 August 2005), former librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, was born at Naini Tal, Uttar Pradesh, in India on 23rd May 1925. As the only son of his family and of quite frail health, his father, a half-European half-Indian civil engineer working for the Indian Civil Service, christened him “Hope”. At the age of 5, he moved to England with his mother, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He graduated at Cambridge University with a MA in Modern Languages and then joined the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1948 as an assistant in the library. An instrumental figure in the process of modernisation undertaken by the library after WWII, he was presented in 1981 with the College's award for long and distinguished service, the McNeill Love medal, and retired prematurely in 1986 due to an eye condition. Although his true passions were the books in the library, the sciences, classical music and his roses, his estate provides a peak into a proper 20th-century Indian-born English literati, with meticulously redacted notes about his family, his life and their collection, from which our lot 376 comes.