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By a Hyderabad artist, circa 1740-50

Brush drawing heightened with gold, in a brown album page splashed with gold

Miniature: 17 by 13.2 cm

Folio: 30.2 by 24.7 cm

A lady lies pining on her couch while her duenna whispers to her about her absent lover and her two maids whisper to each other knowingly. There is real interaction between the two pairs of women, while the heroine looks suitably lovelorn.

This fine and lively drawing, which the attention to detail makes look very finished and not at all a preliminary drawing for anything else, has a fully painted counterpart in the Johnson collection in the British Library (Falk, T., and Archer, M., Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, London, 1981, no. 422). The painted version is set at night with a full moon and a pair of white cranes starkly outlined against the dark background. The artist of this drawing, being unable to suggest nighttime, has substituted clumps of plants, all waving in the breeze that agitates the folds of the canopy above. Note especially the delicate designs in the drawing of the bed cover and the parapet of the terrace.

Provenance

Collection of Lady Constantine, Karachi (pencil inscription on verso)

Christie's South Kensington, 15 October 2004, Lot 424

Collection of Pierre Le-Tan (b.1950), the well-known Paris illustrator

Purchased March 2010