A couple making love, Bundi, Late 18th century, opaque pigments heightened with gold...

A couple making love, Bundi, Late 18th century, opaque pigments heightened with gold within a wide red border, depicted in a floral garden surrounded by a lake filled with fish and lotus plants, the man wears a beard and moustache and has long loose brown hair, with a European style hat with a feather plume on his head, he brandishes a musket, which he has discharged aiming at one of the fish, the lady is shown lying on her back wearing gold and pearl jewellery, a large curved tulwar in her right hand and a shield in her left, folio: 25.6 x 18.4 cm; painting: 21.8 x 15.8 cm

Provenance: Doris Wiener Gallery, New York, early 1970s

Exhibited: Doris Wiener Gallery, New York, 1976

Both participants are depicted in three-quarter profile, a viewpoint that became more common in Bundi in the later 18^th century as Mughal artists dispersed from Delhi, but it is also found earlier as in a famous drawing in the National Museum, New Delhi, of a sultry-eyed beauty wearing a similar hat to the man, characterized by the late Cary Welch as The Vamp (Welch, S.C., Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches, The Asia Society, New York, 1976, no. 42). This painting seems to be a caricature of perceived European habits in India, the Farangis, whose appearance in Rajput painting is based on the Dutch embassy led by J.J. Ketelaar which passed through Udaipur in 1711. This stimulated a rich if minor theme in Mewar painting analysed in Topsfield, A., Ketelaars Embassy and the Farangi theme in the art of Udaipur in Oriental Art, vol. XXX, 1984/85, pp. 350-67. From Udaipur, the caricature of Europeans spread to other Rajput courts as here in Bundi. The mans hair, beard and hat are based on the Farangis depicted in Mewar paintings.

The increasingly precarious positions of the Rajput kingdoms under the Maratha dominance of the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in various changes in their painting styles. In Bundi a joyous kind of joie de vivre became the mode in which genre scenes, erotic encounters and ladies at play became dominant motifs in place of the Ragamalas and Rasikapriyas of earlier decades (see Archer, W.G., Indian Painting in Bundi and Kotah, HMSO, 1959, figs. 17-28), with most of them less carefully painted than earlier work. Such scenes of lovers dalliance became increasingly passionate in the Rajput schools in the later eighteenth century; the erotic mood is enhanced by vivid colour clashes here yellows, mauves, greens, blues and reds combine and clash to stimulate the erotic mood in the viewer. For a more decorous amorous encounter from Bundi with similar tonalities featuring Rao Ajit Singh, see Losty, J.P., and Galloway, F., Sringar: an Exhibition celebrating Divine and Erotic Love¸ Francesca Galloway, London, 2007, no. 21. A similar tender lover scene on a terrace is in the Brooklyn Museum (Poster, Amy G., et al., Realms of Heroism: Indian Paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1994. no. 130).