Tanpura drawing

As a nayika (archetypal heroine), this figure personifies the ideal of feminine beauty as conceptualized in Indian devotional poetry of the period. She strums a tanpura and wears elaborate jewelry and sheer textiles, clearly placing her as a member of the court. At the same time, there is the allusion that she is Radha, the divine consort of Krishna, who was important to these Kishangarh patrons. View more New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Indian Court Painting: 16th–19th Century," March 25–July 6, 1997. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Indian Court Painting," 2000. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Mughal Influence in Rajasthani Painting," 2001. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Drawings from the Courts of North India: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century," 2002. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "New Acquisitions in Perspective," 2006. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions," October 24, 2008–February 1, 2009. National Portrait Gallery, London. "The Indian Portrait 1560–1860," March 4, 2010–June 13, 2010. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Ragamala: Picturing Sound," Jun-14-Dec-10-2014. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Poetry and Devotion in Indian Painting: A Curatorial Legacy," June 15–December 4, 2016.

(1996.100.1) Place of creation India Credit line Fletcher Fund, 1996 Notes The Kishangarh atelier is renowned for its paintings and for highly finished, large-scale, tinted drawings such as this one. Images of a woman drinking wine, holding flowers, or playing an instrument became popular in Rajasthani painting during the first half of the eighteenth century, evolving in part from imperial Mughal precedents. Here, an entertainer appears to have transformed into a nayika, an idealized Indian heroine and personification of female beauty. She is adorned in courtly costume and jewels and plucks the string of her tanpura (a drone instrument of the lute family, frequently played by women) with henna-dyed fingertips. The drawing must date from before the 1740s, when a far more stylized and exaggerated facial type became the vogue at Kishangarh. References • The Met object ID: • Artstor artwork ID: • Indian subcontinent Source/Photographer • Licensing [ ] Public domain Public domain false false This work is in the life plus 70 years or fewer. You must also include a not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the do implement the rule of the shorter term. Copyright may extend on works created by French who died for France in https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/ PDM Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 false false The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that " faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public do...