This artwork is meant to be viewed from right to left. Scroll left to view more.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
Artwork Details
Use your arrow keys to navigate the tabs below, and your tab key to choose an item
Title:"Bakasura, the Crane Demon, Disgorges Krishna," Folio from a dispersed Bhagavata Purana (The Ancient Story of God)
Date:ca. 1690
Medium:Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
Dimensions:Page: H. 11 1/8 in. (28.3 cm) W. 14 7/8 in. (37.8 cm) Painting: H. 8 3/4 in. (22.2 cm) W. 12 in. (30.5 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Promised Gift of the Kronos Collections, 2015
Shortly after Krishna and the gopas (cow herders) had moved to Brindaban, they brought their cows to a pond, depicted here with flowering lotus plants and paired ducks in the foreground of the picture. Also depicted here are two gopas (with blue woolen coverings on their heads) and Krishna’s older brother, Balarama, who raises his arm in astonishment at what is transpiring. Balarama has seen that a monstrous demon, assuming the form of a colossal crane, has swallowed his brother Krishna . Yet the Divine One “emitted so much heat that he burned the insides of Baka(sura), who was then forced to disgorge him.” This godinduced vomiting is the astonishing incident that is depicted here. Later on in Book Ten from the Bhagavata Purana,“ Krishna will seize the demonbird by the two halves of his long bill and tear him apart.” (1) This picture comes from a large series that once comprised as many as one hundred paintings. But pictures from this Series are now widely dispersed in public and private collections in India and the West. This large and important Series appears to have been made over a period of about fifty or more years. However only the small number of paintings dating from the late seventeenth century (about 15 in number), like the present work, are highly valued. These paintings display a “meticulous precision of line, very fine detailing, and a high level of 24. SK.021 DP334021.TIF and DP334036.TIF sophistication in the treatment of pictorial elements” (2), as opposed to later works from the Series which display “naivete of composition and pettiness of figuredrawing, covered however with innumerable details and elaborate ornament in many colors and gold.” (3) Like all Bikaner paintings of this period, this work is greatly indebted to Mughal painting. The important figures of the narrative are arranged in a single line at the center of the picture, like the five characters in the ca. 152030 ‘Palam Bhagavata Purana ‘ painting (cat. no. 1), probably from Rajasthan; but the background color is a Mughal apple green, not an Early Rajput red. The meticulous drawing, miniaturistic detail, and high finish are Mughal inspired creations. But the childlike simplicity and the wide eyed sense of wonder and astonishment are purely Rajasthani. For a discussion of this dispersed Bhagavata Purana Series from Bikaner, see Hermann Goetz, The Art and Architecture of Bikaner State (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1950), pp. 11213. (1) Lerner, op. cit., pg. 176 (2) Ibid (3) Goetz, op. cit., pp. 11213
Inscription: Inscribed on the front in the upper border with two short words in the Marwari dialect of Rajasthani written in devanagari script: “episode 18” and an undecipherable number in the upper left corner. Inscribed on the reverse with two lines of text in the Marwari dialect of Rajasthani, and a third line in Marwari supplying a missing phrase belonging to the two-line text; also inscribed with two Indic numbers, the one written in red crayon (“73”), the other written in black ink (“18”); notated with the effaced, inked stamp in purple ink of the Bikaner royal collection
Colnaghi, 1980?
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.
