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"The Great Festivity (Maha Utsav): Six Figures Celebrate with Music and Dance," Folio from the "Early Bikaner" Bhagavata Purana (The Ancient Story of God)
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Title:"The Great Festivity (Maha Utsav): Six Figures Celebrate with Music and Dance," Folio from the "Early Bikaner" Bhagavata Purana (The Ancient Story of God)
Date:ca. 1610
Culture:India, Rajasthan, probably kingdom of Bikaner
Credit Line:Promised Gift of Steven Kossak, The Kronos Collections
Object Number:L.2018.44.3
A male figure of some importance, wearing a peacock feather turban and brandishing a sword, appears at the center of the painting, dancing with a skirted, halfnaked swami, brandishing a censer and wearing a belt of bells and a peacock feather headdress. Two musicians and two soldiers take part in the general hilarity. Are they all besotted with drink? The six figures are accompanied by four horned cattle. The scene takes place by the shore of a lake or river. The specific incident depicted here has not been identified. The Series to which this and the following work (cat. no. 11) once belonged are thought to represent the earliest known court painting from Bikaner, an important kingdom in the northwest of Rajasthan. The Series was probably made for Raja Rai Singh (r. 15711611), the greatest ruler of the kingdom. By the late sixteenth century Maharaja Rai Singh had become an important courtier and general for his Mughal overlords. Because of him, the “unstable, poor and unimportant desert kingdom became a power within the Mughal Empire, and wealth, luxuries, art and culture streamed into the desert, as the price paid for the blood of the Rathor (Bikaner) soldiers, who fought the wars of the Grand Mughals.” (1) At the Mughal court, Rai Singh must have become aware that sponsoring court painting , so handy for the production of the “new fangled”, or genuine, portraits that were being produced at that time, and the depiction of lavish Hindu texts, was one of the primary attributes of a great king. So he created in Bikaner a court workshop along Mughal lines, yet employing local artists, to create works that reflected his religious sensibility and his kingdom’s greater glory. (See also cat. no. 21.) The Bhagavata Purana Series to which this painting and the following painting once belonged was probably one of Rai Singh’s first major productions. It would have been made for him by the hereditary Muslim converts (called Utsa artists), originally from Multan , whom Rai Singh brought to Bikaner to become his first court painters. (2) They would 10 SK.009 DP336296.TIF have used as their model the then fashionable Popular Mughal Style ( cat. nos. 79). a Mughalized variant of the Early Rajput Style ( cat. nos 14). The Kronos Collection is particularly rich in material from the desert kingdom of Bikaner. (cat. nos. 1011, 1925, 27) The collection contains two or three examples by Bikaner’s greatest painter, the master artist Ruknuddin (cat. nos. 2022), and ranges in date from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries (cat. nos. 1011), through the eighteenth century (cat. no. 25). The MughalBikaner connection, so important for Bikaner’s art, lasted for as long as the Mughal empire lasted, that is to say until 1858. After the reign of Rai Singh, Bikaner painting became increasingly Mughalized (3), probably thanks to the Mughaltrained artists whom Rai Singh’s successors invited to settle in their capital. (4) But the Bikaner court painters, hereditary Muslim artists belonging to the Utsav clan, yet working for Hindu patrons, were not slavish followers of their Mughal overlords. Indeed the paintings the Bikaner court artists produced for the Bikaner court were highly distinctive, combining Mughal refinement with Rajasthani naivete and earthiness, as consistent with local taste., which was always respected. (1) Hermann Goetz, The Art and Architecture of Bikaner State (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1950), pp. 4041 (3) For this second, increasingly Mughalized phase of Bikaner painting, see catalogue no. 19. See also Goetz, op. cit., col.pl. VII. (4) Karl Khandalavala, Moti Chandra and Pramod Chandra, Miniature Paintings from the Sri Motichand Khajanchi Collection (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademie, 1960), pp. 1819. See also Shanane Davis, The Bikaner School Usta Artisans and Their Heritage (Jodhpur: RMG Exports, 2008). (2) For the hereditary Utsa court painters of Bikaner, see Naval Krishna, “The Umrani MasterPainters of Bikaner and Their Genealogy” in Andrew Topsfield, ed., Court Painting in Rajasthan (Mumbai: Mapin Publications, 2000), pp. 5764.
Inscription: Inscribed on the reverse with the numbers “270 / 8” and the Indic number “18”; also inscribed with three short inscriptions written in devanagari script; notated with an effaced Bikaner royal collections stamp in purple ink and a partially visible modern label in English
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Divine Pleasures: Painting from India's Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections," June 13–September 11, 2016.
Cincinnati Art Museum. "Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art," November 11, 2022–February 5, 2023.
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. "Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art," March 31, 2023–July 10, 2023.
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