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Maidens with fireworks in a forest grove, probably during the festival of Shab-barat Mughal, North India, mid-18th Century image 1
Maidens with fireworks in a forest grove, probably during the festival of Shab-barat Mughal, North India, mid-18th Century image 2
Lot 281

Maidens with fireworks in a forest grove, probably during the festival of Shab-barat
Mughal, North India, mid-18th Century

25 October 2021, 11:00 BST
London, New Bond Street

£8,000 - £12,000

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Maidens with fireworks in a forest grove, probably during the festival of Shab-barat
Mughal, North India, mid-18th Century

gouache and gold on paper laid down on an album page with gold-sprinkled green outer borders; verso, a calligraphic composition, 17th-18th Century of two couplets of Persian verse written diagonally in nasta'liq script in black ink within cloudbands on a light pink ground, inner margins ruled in colours and gold
painting 190 x 125 mm.; calligraphic composition 173 x 85 mm.; album page 451 x 310 mm.

Footnotes

The festival of Shab-barat is held on the fourteenth day of the month of Shaban, 'on which a vigil is observed with prayers, feastings and illuminations, and Muslims make offerings and oblations in the names of ancestors. On this night the lives and fortunes of mortals for the coming year are registered in heaven' (J. P. Losty, L. Y. Leach, Mughal Paintings from the British Library, London, n.d., no. 17 (illustrating and discussing a painting of 1735-40 from the Johnson Album: see T. Falk, M. Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, London 1981, no. 171). For other examples of the same (probable) subject, see a work of 1730-40 in the San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney III Collection; illustrated in W. Dalrymple and Y. Sharma (edd.), London 2012, p. 87, no. 15. The festivities are more typically shown on a lakeside terrace (as in the works cited above).

The calligraphic composition verso was copied by Hafiz Muhammad Burhan al-Din (unrecorded).

Additional information