A Barber Cleaning the Ear of a Courtesan (c. 1890): Art, History and Details

A Barber Cleaning the Ear of a Courtesan (c. 1890) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Shri Gobinda Chandra Roy (Indian, active late 1800s).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Popular Kalighat paintings were made into woodcuts for mass printing and distribution. This image reveals the lifestyle of a new middle class of Indians who prospered under British rule. Holding a fancy hookah for pleasurable smoking, draped with jewels, wearing a glamorous sari, and with a flower tucked in her hair, she has the luxury of going to a barber to have her ears cleaned. The age of mechanical reproduction made a heavy impact on the new Indian middle class during the last decades of the 1800s. British magazines and periodicals were fashionable among Indian households, and they served to shape their taste for British and Western styles and commodities. Cheaper prints such as this woodcut were made for more popular distribution. They spoke to aspirations or observations by a broader, less privileged community.

Object facts

• Title: A Barber Cleaning the Ear of a Courtesan
• Date: c. 1890
• Creator attribution: Shri Gobinda Chandra Roy (Indian, active late 1800s)
• Culture: Eastern India, Bengal, Kolkata, Kalighat
• Type: Print
• Technique: woodcut
• Dimensions: Secondary Support: 50 x 30.3 cm (19 11/16 x 11 15/16 in.); Print only: 45.5 x 28.2 cm (17 15/16 x 11 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2003.118

Collection credit

Gift of William E. Ward in memory of his wife, Evelyn Svec Ward

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.