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Artwork Details
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Title:Inhabited Arabesque
Date:early 18th century
Medium:Brush drawing in black ink heightened with white and touches of color
Dimensions:Page: H. 7 3/4 in. (19.7 cm) W. 8 15/16 in. (21.1 cm) Painting: H. 4 3/4 in. (12.1 cm) W. 6 1/2 in. (16.5 cm)
Classification:Codices
Credit Line:Promised Gift of the Kronos Collections, 2015
The Indian court artist, like the royal artists in premodern Europe, had multiple responsibilities. He was consulted with respect to almost anything requiring a visual component. Therefore, he provided designs for temporary festivities as well as permanent undertakings (the decoration of palaces and royal libraries, for example), in addition to his more normal responsibility, i.e. to provide paintings or illustrations for manuscripts or series destined for the royal library. This wonderful design might have been the model for the decoration of a palace wall or corridor, for a piece of carved furniture, for a painted box or lacquered chest, or for almost any type of thing that was destined for royal use. This design would have been executed in paint or stucco, or some other material, by a craftsman trained to follow the present master artist’s every inflexion. This sheet is the obvious work of an artist, not a craftsman: it has the suavity of touch, wealth of invention, and knowledge of tradition which only an artist dwelling in a history- obsessed studio could provide. At the center of this complicated work, two elephant heads collide and interlock, their faces and trunks deeply intertwined. Along more distant sections of the same scrolling vines, and to the right and left, the heads of lions and makaras (Ganges crocodiles) disgorge the bodies of chin lin, mythical Chinese beasts resembling flying, winged cows. These animal- inhabited, scrolling vines issue from masks decorated with the foliated faces of women, probably peris, or celestial creatures. These masks appear on the right and left borders of the composition. This work was executed in brush and black ink, heightened with touches of white and color. It could have been endlessly repeated or expanded to fill a surface of almost any size. This work of finely drawn mythical animals depicted against a scrolling arabesque field ultimately derives from the 15th or 16th century Persian art, as filtered by the decorative programs of the Indian Mughals. By the eighteenth century, the intricacy of the type of decorative program depicted here required a paper pattern drawn by a master painter, as the craftsman for whom it was made, despite his skill, was probably not sufficiently competent to invent decorative designs to satisfy the sophisticated taste of his patron. Earlier works of the same type were probably also made, yet they have mostly not survived.. Indian designers of art objects, and the works for which their drawings were made, are an important yet virtually unstudied aspect of Indian art. For one of the few articles on the subject see Jagdish Mittal, “Indian painters as designers of decorative art objects in the Mughal period” in Robert Skelton et al, eds., Facets of Indian Art (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986), pp. 24352.
Marukh Desai, 1982
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.
The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
