Page from a Ragamala Series: Megha Raga (Primary Title)
Unknown (Artist)
This painting comes from a historically important and large-format ragamala arranged in the 42-page system. Soratha Ragini appears in such sets in various positions and with widely differing imagery. Here, a hero and heroine seated in a luxurious tent among nature’s bounty take pan—an aromatic digestive—from a tray offered by a female attendant. A second servant fans them, and two more play instruments for the couple. Late 17th-century painters from southern Rajasthan abandoned the abstracted spatial stage of Central Indian compositions—with their flat, uninterrupted color fields constricting the subject to an extremely shallow foreground—for a more relaxed, naturalistic mode that pushed the action into a new middle ground that, here, is laden with intricate, visually competing pictorial details.
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