Marbled Elephant
Not on view
This work depicts a trotting elephant with two riders, and a third figure running ahead of the creature. The body of the elephant and the human figures have been made in the technique of marbling (abri). Marbled paintings are well known from the Deccan region in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This technique involved manipulating floating pigments on the surface of a liquid bath to form designs, which were then transferred to a sheet of paper by carefully laying it on top. Deccani artists skillfully blocked off areas of the scene to create parts that are marbled (in this case, the bodies of the animal and figures) before finishing the work with fine black ink shading.
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