Girls Spraying Each Other at Holi (c. 1640–50): Art, History and Details

Girls Spraying Each Other at Holi (c. 1640–50) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The antics of Holi, the festival of spring, are in full tilt in this scene that takes place in the women's quarters of a palace. Most of the women have already been stained with the red and yellow colors that they squirt and smear on one another to the beat of handheld drums and a lively song. In a composition repeated from an imperial Mughal scene, one woman aggressively and playfully has another in a headlock and pours red liquid down her blouse. The princely state of Bikaner had close ties with the Mughal court, and some of its artists were familiar with Mughal painting, as is evident in the rendering of the garden and the figures.

Object facts

• Title: Girls Spraying Each Other at Holi
• Date: c. 1640–50
• Culture: Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput Kingdom of Bikaner
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 19 x 12.5 cm (7 1/2 x 4 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1971.83

A detail from the museum

The sandstone cascade at the top of the page propels water through the garden channels.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Leach, Linda York. Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.
• Diamond, Debra. "Holi in the Zenana: Genre, Style and Sociability." In A Magic World: New Visions of Indian Painting. Molly Emma Aitken, 100-115. Mumbai, India: Published by Radhika Sabavala for the Marg Foundation, 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.