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Artwork Details
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Title:Lady on a Swing in the Monsoon
Date:ca. 1750–75
Culture:India, Punjab Hills
Medium:Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
Dimensions:Page: H. 8 1/2 in. (21.6 cm); W. 6 5/16 in. (16 cm) Painting: H. 7 1/8 in. (18.1 cm); W. 5 in. (12.7 cm)
Classification:Codices
Credit Line:Promised Gift of Steven Kossak, The Kronos Collections
Accession Number:L.2018.44.1
A lady stands on a swing suspended from the limb of a flowering tree during the
monsoon, or rainy season. Since the arrival of this yearly, eagerly anticipated rain event , is a
joyful time in India, playing with a swing to circulate air is a seasonally appropriate thing to do.
In this delightful picture the wellborn and extremely comely lady is attended by two maids and a
female singer, who performs with open arms. The lady’s handmaidens hold a gold, jewel- encrusted pandan (a box containing pan, a lime paste, areca nut, tobacco, and betel leaf
concoction, with tray) and a huqqah (hubble bubble), all of which the lady will later use in her
rainsoaked entertainment. The sky in the background is heavy with threatening clouds.
The lady on the swing, with hennadecorated palms, wears a long, pink dress (peshwaj)
and a red scarf, which like the bottom of her dress, floats in the breeze behind her. She has a
vigorous, youthful body; a pretty face; long black hair; and very fair skin. The lady’s lookalike
maids are not real creatures of flesh and blood either. Like the lady on the swing, they embody
a certain ideal of feminine beauty. This gracious physical type was first invented by the great
Pahari artist Nainsukh (ca. 1710 1778) in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. He
wished to portray the ideal woman. To him ordinary “ladies languish with grief yet even at
moments of despair their innate breeding precludes recourse to rough or brusque gestures.
Faces are noble and serene, figures tall and graceful, stances exquisite and poised..... Every
woman is a princess imbued with idyllic grace.” (1)
Through the agency of Nainsukh’s four artist sons and two artist nephews, this gracious
female type resurfaced throughout the entire Punjab Hills later in the century, replacing a
rougher earlier type, to become the omnipresent, yet idealized, image of the Pahari woman, as
portrayed in later Pahari painting. (For the artist Nainsukh, see cat. nos. 69 and 70.)
For another painting of the same subject see M.S. Randhawa, Kangra Paintings on Love
(New Delhi: National Museum, 1962), pl. XV.
71 SK.066 DP335775.TIF.
(l) M.S. Randhawa, Kangra Paintings of the Gita Govinda (New Delhi: National Museum,
1963), pg. 18.
Swiss Collection 1983
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Flame and the Lotus," September 20, 1984–March 3, 1985.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art [The Met Breuer]. "Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs," October 10, 2017–January 2, 2018.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs," March 4–June 10, 2018.
Royal Ontario Museum. "Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs," July 21–October 21, 2018.
Sylvia Houghteling highlights three works from the Divine Pleasures exhibition that depict the heat and sensuality of the love between the god Krishna and his beloved Radha.
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.
