`Abdul Samud - Persian General in Dost Mohd.s. Service Kabul'
Watercolour
Afghanistan - 1836
Vigne, Godfrey Thomas, born 1801 - died 1863

Vigne was an intrepid explorer and a gifted amateur artist, especially in his powerful characterisation of the various ethnic types he encountered on his travels. Vigne met Abdul Samut in 1836 at the court of Dost Muhammad, then ruler of Kabul. He took an instant dislike to him, but was persuaded, for his own safety, to give him the bottle of brandy he was demanding. Abdul Samut later moved from Kabul to Bukhara, where he became the right-hand man of the notorious Amir, and was allegedly responsible for numerous cruelties, including the murder in 1842 of two British officers, Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly. When Dr Joseph Wolff, an indomitable clergyman, attempted to discover what had happened to them, he was imprisoned, and only narrowly avoided the same fate. The story is told in Wolff's Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara in the years 1843-1845 (2 vols. 1845), where this portrait is reproduced as a lithograph.

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