A watercolour of a turbaned man, full length, seated on the ground cleaning cotton. Signed lower left; inscribed lower right. Inscribed as exhibited at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (India 61).

Horace Van Ruith visited Bombay (now Mumbai) in the early 1880s, where he produced idealised watercolours depicting the daily lives and various trades of local people. His work in watercolours and oils was exhibited in in The Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, where it was thought 'extremely good'. Held in London, The Colonial and Indian Exhibition was a six-month display of colonial culture and commerce, and a demonstration of British imperial power that coincided with Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. The exhibition offered a carefully constructed experience of India, one which centred around a nostalgic, romanticised view of the country, and emphasised village community and traditional crafts (see Saloni Mathur, 'Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886' Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2000, pp. 492-524).