This design was acquired by Caspar Purdon Clarke during a purchasing tour to India made on behalf of the museum in 1881-1882. Sir Casper Purdon Clarke (1846-1911) was a trained architect who entered HM Office of Works and in 1867 transferred to the Works Department of the South Kensington Museum. He designed the Indian Section of the 1877 Paris Exhibition, and arranged the Indian collections at South Kensington in 1880.He became the first Keeper of the museum's Indian Section in 1883, and was subsequently Director until 1896. He was an architect and may have originally bought this, and five other drawings (four of which are now in the V&A), for his own collection, as suggested by a pencil annotation: "Purdon Clarke Collection (C) Golden Temple Amritsar (Sikh Ornament)". This is in the hand of Purdon Clarke's son, Caspar Stanley Clarke, who himself became Keeper from 1911 to 1926. The identification of the design as a copy of wall paintings in the Golden Temple itself is not entirely reliable as nothing has survived to this day that resembles it, and the theory was firmly dismissed by the distinguished Sikh scholar Patwant Singh in 1998 when he examined the series of designs. They would have been produced at the Mayo School of Art in Lahore as its Principal, John Lockwood Kipling, actively encouraged his students to study architectural ornamentation.