Gallery Text :
It was not unusual for the resident British of nineteenth-century Delhi to buy ruined or abandoned Mughal or Sultanate buildings and monuments, which they then converted from their original functions to habitable spaces. This painting illustrates the conversion of a hammam (bath house) into a living room, complete with a piano or harpsichord, a bench, and an assortment of glass bottles and other objects. The white floor inlaid with flower motifs resembles that of the hammam at the Red Fort in Delhi, where a British national had been installed by the early nineteenth century.