Add Or 5577

Malkos raga, from the so-called ‘Boston Ragamala’ In vertical format, the usual three tiers of this series include an elephant fight at the bottom outside the palace wall; a pillared room in the palace where the princely hero sits with the heroine in his lap accepting ‘pan’ from a female attendant, with other attendants and musicians under a ‘shamiana’; and the pavilions of the palace’s upper story with a waiting bed.

By a Mewar artist, 1695-1705.

Inscribed on reverse: ‘rāg mālkos’.

Opaque watercolour and gold; painting 380 by 220 mm, within yellow and orange margins (trimmed at top); page 385 by 288 mm.

Provenance: collection of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy; Ralph and Catherine Benkaim collection; Indar Pasricha private collection. Purchased January 2005.

Other pages: All were in A.K. Coomaraswamy’s collection, 8 pages are now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and others are scattered in various American collections. One page is in the British Museum (Vasant) and another is in the Ashmolean, Oxford. For the series see A. Topsfield, ‘Court painting at Udaipur’, Zurich, 2002, pp. 100-101, and notes.

A prince with his girlfriend form the usual iconography for this ‘raga’, but the large format of this series dictated a much more elaborate composition. Topsfield points out the resemblance between the princely hero and the young prince Amar Singh, who seems to have maintained a studio at his court at Rajnagar when in rebellion in the 1690s. The hero of this painting is growing a moustache that sweeps round to under his ears, a style which Amar Singh affected after his accession in 1698 (Topsfield, figs. 95-105).