Lady About to Smoke a Hookah

Painting from the Punjab Hills in the second half of the eighteenth century was deeply indebted to earlier Mughal painting styles of that century. Pahari artists became skilled in rendering the illusionistic space, idealized proportions of figures and facial types, and more naturalistic depiction of nature that characterized the late Mughal style. Although the Pahari (hill states) style was more naturalistic than that of contemporaneous Rajasthani painting, each tradition used a stock repertoire of lines to create images. In this example, each feature of the young heroine’s anatomy, for example, is a simple curve, from the gentle slope of her inner forearm to the rounds of her breasts or the gentle backward s of her calf. This underdrawing shows something of the artist’s thought process as he composed the picture. He has shifted the pavilion to the right,lowered the bottom edge of the picture, and changed the position of his heroine’s legs, upper arms, and torso. Had the artist finished the painting, the record of these changes as well as the numerous finely wrought details would have been effaced by a layer of color and by a finely controlled finished drawing.

Ink on paper

Overview

Creator : 

Anonymous

Collection : 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Date :

1790

Rights :

CC0

Copyright-free

You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Creative Commons

You can :

remix /  adapt this work even for commercial purposes, as long as you :

  • give appropriate credit and
  • license new creations under the identical terms.


Creative Commons

You can remix, adapt, and build upon this work, even commercially, as long as you:

  • credit the original creation. 


Creative Commons

Explore More