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Artwork Details
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Title:"The Village Beauty," Folio from the dispersed "Kangra ‘Bihari" Sat Sai (Seven Hundred Verses)
Date:ca. 1785
Medium:Opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper
Dimensions:Page: H. 8 1/8 in. (20.6 cm) W. 5 7/8 in. (14.9 cm) Painting: H. 7 3/8 in. (18.7 cm) W. 5 3/16 in. (13.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of the Kronos Collections, 2015
On the terrace in the background, Krishna is seated with an old woman who has draped a shawl over her head to ward off the coolness of the approaching night. The old woman is describing the beauty of the willowy maiden the village beauty depicted in the foreground. The old woman is rhapsodizing about the beauty of the rustic maiden’s “elevated bosom”. This great beauty, wearing a loosely tied pink headscarf and a garland of wild flowers, is guarding the village paddy field, which is protected by a hedge of euphorbia. There is an irrigation channel in the foreground and a pile of large boulders in the middle distance, distinctive to the Kangra Valley (1) where this painting was made. Of course a good harvest, which Krishna’s love for the beautiful guardian ensures, is essential to the wellbeing of the entire village community. The rounded contours of the gently rolling landscape, the swaying tree trunks, and the lady’s curvaceous flesh are all amplified by the oval format of the composition. However all of these curving forms witihin the oval format have been stabilized by the hard angles of the man- made architecture , resulting in a work that is classically balanced. As one critic has noted (2), the scarlet and yellow of the peasant girl’s dress, and the yellow of Krishna’s outfit, are synonymous with love’s ardor, The two lovers might be separated by the mottled color of the paddy field that separates them, but their warm individual colors smolder amidst all of the bucolic green. Two other paintings in the Kronos Collection (nos. 87 and 88) are from the ‘Kangra Bihari Sat Sai’ Series’. For discussion of this Series, see catalogue no. 87. 1. Randhawa, op. cit., pg. 70 2. Kossak, op. cit., pg.. 106
Inscription: Inscribed on the verso in black ink: a ten line poem in Hindi written in devanagari script (For an English translation see M.S. Randhawa, op. cit., pg. 70.)
Ancestral Collection of Maharaja Manvindra Shah of Tehri Garhwal, Narendranagar, Garhwal, U.P., but probably acquired from the Kangra royal collection on the occasion of the wedding of Sansar Chand's two daughters to Raja Sudarshan Shah of Tehri Garhwal in 1829; Swiss Collection until 1983
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.
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.
