Inscribed on the verso with a Hindi verse entitled Gauda ragini Meghamallar ki (‘Gauri ragini of Meghamallar’) and with a Datia State collection stamp
Provenance:
Datia Royal Collection
Alice and Nasli Heeramaneck, New York
Dr. Claus Virch
Sotheby's, New York, March 17, 2015, no. 1124
Published:
Alice Heeramaneck, Masterpieces of Indian Painting Formerly in the Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collections, Geneva, 1984, p. 41, pl. 24
A blue-skinned lady is walking through the forest at night holding a vina in her hand and reaches up to pluck a mango blossom from the tree behind her, to the consternation of the peacock up there. Two other peacocks on either side look to see what she is doing. Her peacock-feathered overskirt with matching cap suggests she is affecting to be a tribal woman of the forest. Highly-stylized trees with long, lanceolate leaves, individually depicted, are on either side. She is portrayed against a brilliant red rectangular ground, as is often the case in early painting from this region. Tangled clouds above suggest a storm is threatening, while the dark stripes below would seem to represent a flowing river.
The text on the verso is very corrupt, but the various Sanskrit and Hindi verses describing this ragini generally agree on a lady alone in the forest picking mango blossoms and looking for her lover (Ebeling, K., Ragamala Painting, Ravi Kumar, Basel, 1973, pl. 11, figs. 265, 266). The artist who painted this painting has made a dramatic event out of it. She is dressed in the same manner as Asavari ragini, a true forest dweller, as depicted in another larger format Orccha Ragamala from circa 1650 (Seitz, Konrad, Orchha, Datia, Panna, Malwa Miniaturen von den rajputischen Höfen Bundelkhands 1580-1850, Hanstein Verlag, Köln, 2015, no. 22). He has also added the peacocks and the vina which are not normally part of Gauri’s iconography, as well as the threatening rain.
For another unusual Ragamala painting from the same series in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, see Heeramaneck, op. cit., pl. 23. For two pages from a very similar Ragamala series but with text in the panel above, see Seitz, op. cit., nos. 13.1-2.
J.P. Losty