A chalk drawing depicting a hunting party on elephants and horseback pursuing wild boar.

Charles Stewart accompanied his father Henry Hardinge to India in 1844 as his private secretary; Henry Hardinge was Governor-General of India 1844-47. A keen amateur artist, Charles exhibited landscapes from 1849 to 1880. He wrote to his half-brother in January 1847 that he was 'flattered in becoming a contributor to the Royal Album'; he may have been referring to a group of four drawings of Indian subjects, including this one, which were mounted by Queen Victoria in a red crimson velvet album seemingly compiled between c.1834 and the mid-1850s. Writing in her journal about a visit made by the Maharajah Duleep Singh to Buckingham Palace on 11 July 1854, Victoria recorded that 'We [she and Albert] showed him a drawing of himself & a view of Lahore, done by young Hardinge, which seemed to interest & please him'. Duleep Singh was the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. He was exiled in 1849 at the age of thirteen, following the British annexation of the Punjab in the Second Anglo-Sikh War.