A prince celebrating Holi with palace women on a terrace at night (recto); calligraphy of a quatrain (verso) (c. 1760): Art, History and Details

A prince celebrating Holi with palace women on a terrace at night (recto); calligraphy of a quatrain (verso) (c. 1760) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Images of pleasure and play abound in Mughal paintings of the latter half of the 1700s. Under a full moon reflected off a river and by the light of candles, a prince celebrates the spring festival of Holi with a group of palace women. Holi festivities include the boisterous tradition of smearing one another with colored powders—shown heaped on dishes—or shooting colored liquid using plunger guns.

Object facts

• Title: A prince celebrating Holi with palace women on a terrace at night (recto); calligraphy of a quatrain (verso)
• Date: c. 1760
• Culture: India, Farrukhabad, Mughal, 18th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 28.2 x 20.2 cm (11 1/8 x 7 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.342

A detail from the museum

Pairs of ducks swim under the full moon on the night of the vernal equinox.

Collection credit

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Mace, Sonya Rhie, Mohsen Ashtiany, Catherine Glynn, Pedro Moura Carvalho, Marcus Fraser, and Ruby Lal. Mughal Paintings: Art and Stories: the Cleveland Museum of Art. London: D Giles Limited, 2016.

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.