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A drawing of Kaiser Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana (1892-1964) on horseback. Signed with initials and dated, lower right.

Kaiser Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana was a field marshal in the Royal Nepali Army, but is perhaps better known for his library at Kathmandu. In 1908 he visited Britain with his father, Maharaja Sir Chandra Shamser Jang Bahadur Rana, Prime Minister of Nepal. Kaiser Shumsher was hugely impressed by the library and museum system, and upon his return to Nepal began to develop his private library, which nowadays includes more than sixty thousand books, documents and manuscripts. During Kaiser Shumser's lifetime the library was accessible only to scholars and academics, but before his death in 1964 he instructed that the Kaiser Library should be opened to public access. Since 1968 it has been maintained by the Ministry of Education. 

In December 1911 King George V and Queen Mary were proclaimed Emperor and Empress of India at the Delhi Durbar. (A durbar is a court or official reception held, traditionally, by an Indian ruler.) Almost all of the ruling princes and noblemen of India, in addition to thousands of other Indian dignitaries, attended in order to pay obeisance to the symbolic heads of British colonial power. This portrait of Kaiser Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana is among the drawings made during the royal tour of India. Many of them were subsequently mounted in an album alongside drawings produced during the royal tour of the British Empire in 1901.

The artist and illustrator George Percy Jacomb-Hood trained at the Slade School of Art and in Paris before becoming artist-correspondent of The Graphic. It was in this role that he accompanied several royal visits to India at the start of the century. In October 1911 he travelled as part of the Royal suite to India on HMS Medina with King George V and Queen Mary.