Major (later Colonel) John Alexander Temple was born in about 1860 and died in 1928. He was one of the three sons of Sir Richard Temple, Bt. (1826-1902), Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces (1862) and Governor of Bombay (1877), who was himself an amateur artist and played a leading role in Indian art education. John Alexander was the younger step-brother of Lieutenant Colonel Sir Richard Carnac Temple, Bt. (1850-1931), Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (1894), under whom he served alongside their cousin, Harry Rivett-Carnac. The V&A owns five paintings by this artist which were acquired in 1937. This landscape, painted in Ambagarh in the Bandhara region of the Central Provinces, India, shows, in the foreground, the top of a building with a minaret and enclosed forecourt facing wide fields interspersed with flowering plants, trees, mounds and scattered hill ranges extending towards the horizon