A watercolour portrait of Kippat Khan, a chieftain of the Mohmit Khel, a Pashtun people from the Bannu district in the Khyber Paktunkhwa Province (formerly the North West Frontier Province) of India, now Pakistan. He stands with both his hands resting on the pommel of his upturned sword, and has a pair of daggers in his belt. Signed, dated lower right. Inscribed at the bottom: Kippat Khan. Mahomed Khel Wazari. 

Control of the North West Frontier was all important to the defence of British India particularly due to fears of Russian expansion into Central Asia. The region was claimed by the Kingdom of Afghanistan until 1893, when the boundary was settled under a treaty agreed by the Afghan king, Abdur Rahman Khan. Previously many of the Pashtun peoples of the region, who had repeatedly challenged the foreign occupation, had been the target of British military campaigns. This portrait of Kippat Khan was produced after the treaty of 1893, and it is not known whether he had taken part in combat against the British, as some of the Pashtun groups had remained neutral in this period.

This is a portrait from the Indian sketches album comprising watercolours and drawings by Egron Lundgren, Nicholas Chevalier, Count von Seckendorff and Robert Gosset Woodthorpe. Most of Lundgren's works within the album are set against a backdrop of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and were presented to Queen Victoria. Chevalier's watercolours represent high-ranking Sikh and Ceylonese [Sri Lankan] people who would have sat to the artist during his visits to India and Ceylon while journeying with Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, on the homeward voyage aboard HMS Galatea in 1870.