A sketch taken in the camp at Oudh (present day Awadh, Uttar Pradesh); British and Indian soldiers conferring; an elephant on the right, and another behind; two mounted soldiers with pennants moving away in the middle distance and camels in the background, left.

Lundgren's watercolours and drawings were made on his journey to and from India and during his time there between 1858 and 1859. He travelled with the British Army to Awadh, and made around 500 drawings and watercolours. He represented scenes of unrest and conflict during the Indian Rebellion (1857-8), but perhaps several of the watercolours in the Indian Sketches album were intended to assure his patron, Queen Victoria, that her Indian subjects were still peaceable and content to be ruled from overseas.

Oudh [Awadh], a princely state in the north east of India, was annexed by the British in 1856. Its capital, Lucknow, and in particular the British residency, was the site of fierce fighting between British regiments and Indian sepoys assisted by other Indian combatants, during the Rebellion against colonial oppression. Among the many reasons for the failure of the uprising were a lack of planning and organisation among the Indian combatants and a lack of material resources such as modern weaponry; many of the princely states, which had benefitted materially from British trade, did not support the rebellion. 

This is a drawing from the Indian sketches album comprising watercolours and drawings by Egron Lundgren, Nicholas Chevalier, Count Gotz Burkhard Seckendorff and Robert Gosset Woodthorpe. Most of Lundgren's works within the album are set against a backdrop of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and were presented to Queen Victoria. Chevalier's watercolours represent high-ranking Sikh and Ceylonese [Sri Lankan] people who would have sat to the artist during his visits to India and Ceylon while journeying with Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, on the homeward voyage aboard HMS Galatea in 1870.