A Celebration of the Festival of Holi (Primary Title)
Unknown (Artist)
As the inscription in the sky indicates, this painting depicts a celebration of Holi. Krishna and Radha, in the center of a palace courtyard, are the targets of the riotous spring festival’s most distinctive activity: the dousing of people with brightly colored pigments. Women crowd around the pair, throwing clouds of red powder and spraying the divine couple with tinted water from large syringes, refilled in the tank depicted in the foreground. This modest work illustrates the influence of European artistic conventions—encountered mostly in printed books—on 18th- and 19th-century Indian painters and their patrons. The somewhat pedantic applications of single-point perspective, diminution, and receding diagonals create a relentlessly un-Indian sense of spatial recession.
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