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Artwork Details
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Title:The Absent Lovers: Five Ladies on the Terrace of a Palace
Date:ca. 1740
Medium:Opaque watercolor on paper
Dimensions:Painting: H. 7 5/8 in. (19.4cm) W. 7 7/16 in. (18.9 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of the Kronos Collections, 2015
The three women dressed in white are serving maids. They hold a flower, a huqqah bowl, and a comforting hand, all for the benefit of the two women dressed in pink who employ them. All five women have just come from the bath. They are naked to the waist and their hair is fetchingly wet. The two women dressed in pink gaze at the small pool in the lower right corner of the composition, with its single jet of splashing water. This pool is a probable allusion to the ladies’ absent lovers. (1) This scene of smoldering passion unfolds on the terrace of an elegant palace complex. This rather charming painting depicts a popular subject the steadfast yet sexy lady longing for her absent lover. In style and format it is typically Pahari, yet the picture reflects nevertheless the outside influence of contemporaneous Mughal, or imperial, painting. Note the reduced, almost allwhite palette, for example, and the delineation of the palace architecture. By time this picture was painted the Mughal empire was in political decline. Yet the empire still remained influential in matters of culture. The turbulent folds of the ladies’ garments, and their flattened, marcelled hair, recall a Mankot painting of a bathing lady which W.G. Archer dates to ca, 1730. (2) (1) Lerner 1984, pg. 170 (2) W.G. Archer 1973, Vol. I, pg. 379, no. 37 and Vol. II, pl. 296
ex collection Douglas Barrett; Spinks 1980?
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.
