"Bhil Couple Hunting Deer at Night", Folio from the Davis Album
Not on view
Night hunts were a favorite object of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal painters, serving as settings for both royal hunts and for a genre of paintings featuring tribal forest dwellers, such as the couple seen here dressed in leaf skirts and hunting deer. The woman catches the herd's attention with a torch while her companion shoots an arrow, felling the stag. Their village of thatched huts, set in a forest clearing, occupies the middle ground. Illuminated by the soft glow of the moon, the composition is a study in light and shadow, the master exponent of which in the mid-eighteenth century was the painter Mir Kalan Khan, whose atelier may have been responsible for this painting.
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