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Artwork Details
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Title:Ladies on a Terrace
Artist:Ruknuddin (active late 17th century)
Date:dated 1675
Medium:Opaque watercolor, black ink and gold on paper
Dimensions:Page: H. 10 9/16 in. (26.8 cm) W. 7 9/16 in. (19.2 cm) Painting: H. 7 5/8 in. (19.4 cm) W. 5 5/16 in. (13.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of the Kronos Collections, 2015
Under the balmy light reflected by a golden sky seven ladies are seated within a garden beside a pool in the women’s section (zenana) of a royal palace. The principle ladies at the center are either a royal lady and her servant or two royal ladies. Sitting close together and sharing a glass of wine as well as an intimate embrace, the two ladies obviously adore one another. They are attended by a seated female musician holding a vina (an Indian stringed instrument) and by three servant girls holding a blue pillow, a tray containing a small wine bottle and assorted jewelry, and a fluttering scarf, an emblem of royalty. At some distance from the central group, another resident of the zenana, holding a small mirror and resting on a pillow, is about to play with her caged bird. The porcelain faces, “jewellike color, refined drawing, extraordinary detail, superb finish and poetic mood mark it as one of the finest paintings by Ruknuddin, Bikaner’s premier artist during the late seventeenth century.” (1) (For discussion of the artist Ruknuddin, see cat. no. 22.) The screened nature of unisex life in a royal palace, particularly whatever might have transpired in the zenana, harem, or women’s quarter of a royal palace, was fertile ground for the suggestible, premodern, male imagination. Therefore from the midseventeenth century harem scenes, with overtones of lurid sexuality, became extremely popular in Indian painting. The ‘world apart” depicted in these pictures was partly based on fact. In premodern India, high- born Hindu women and Muslim women of almost any status lived, travelled, and amused themselves in their own carefully guarded quarters: only a husband, father, brother or son was allowed admittance. This artificial world usually resulted in a female society of rigid conventionality. Yet it also resulted on occasion in the kind of girlongirl behavior, as depicted here, that men loved to imagine. (2) This picture displays figure painting of a very high order. The calm majesty of the ladies’ deportment, and the tight interlocking of one figure in space with another, recalls the formal audience scenes, or durbars, characteristic of Mughal painting during the reign of Shah Jahan (r. 162758). But the mood is much more festive. A closely related painting, signed by the artist Ruknuddin and dated 1666, is in the Bikaner royal collection. (3) (1) Kossak, op. cit., pg. 64 (2) For the sociology of the harem, see (3) Hermann Goetz, The Art and Architecture of Bikaner State (Oxford:Bruno Cassirer, 1950), fig. 83 and Mohinder Singh Randhawa and John Kenneth Galbraith, Indian Painting (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968), pl. 19
Inscription: Inscribed on the reverse in black ink in Rajasthani written in devanagari script: Rukam. dı¯m. kara(?) ma¯ro ka¯m sam. 1732 am. 32 (“1” Ruknuddin this is the work of my hand samvat 1732 [a.d. 1675] page 32); also inscribed on the border of the reverse in black ink in Rajasthani written in devanagari script [in a later hand?]: two lines describing the painting and ending with the name “Nathuram”; and the numbers “29” in black pencil, “58” in red pencil, the Indic number “L35” in black ink; notated with two effaced stamps, one from the Bikaner royal collection in purple ink, the other in black ink of unknown provenance; and a doodle
none given
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.
