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Lot 285

A maiden smoking a hookah, leaning on the branches of a blossoming tree
Deccan, early/mid-18th Century

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

Sold for £1,912.50 inc. premium

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A maiden smoking a hookah, leaning on the branches of a blossoming tree
Deccan, early/mid-18th Century

gouache and gold on paper, orange borders
painting 181 x 102 mm.; with borders 218 x 138 mm.

Footnotes

This archetypal Mughal and particularly Deccani subject seems to derive ultimately from ancient Indian stone sculpture, in which a beautiful young woman embraces a tree, or is enveloped by it (salabhanjika). But there are closer and more obviously influential examples for its 'classic' appearance in Deccani painting, e.g. a page from the Dara Shikoh Album (British Library, Add. Or. 3129; T. Falk, M. Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Office Library, London 1981, no. 68, col. pl. 6). Deccani examples in the late 17th and 18th Century become more mannered and openly 'romantic': see M. Zebrowski, Deccani Painting, London 1983, figs. 222 and 232. See also a maiden without a hookah in a painting formerly in the collection of Eva and Konrad Seitz, dated to circa 1720 (Francesca Galloway, Ivory and Painting: Indian Goods for the Luxury Markets, London 2011, pp. 66-67, no. 22); and Christie's, Arts of India, 26th May 2016, lot 3 (where the maiden does have a hookah).

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