Gunakali Ragini (c. 1750): Art, History and Details

Gunakali Ragini (c. 1750) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A princess sits on a throne under a canopy. Her companion holds the royal fly whisk above her head. According to the verse at the top, she absentmindedly plucks flowers as she daydreams about lovemaking. Below, a woman holds an instrument, possibly referring to the musical compositions that were played for the viewers in accordance with the scene and mood of the verse. The two women kneel on a carpet, which the artist has tilted up to a vertical plane, so its pattern of stylized water lilies on a bold orange ground surrounded by a green border with undulating flowering vines can be fully seen.

Object facts

• Title: Gunakali Ragini
• Date: c. 1750
• Culture: Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Jaipur
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 23.6 x 15.6 cm (9 5/16 x 6 1/8 in.); Overall: 30.5 x 22.9 cm (12 x 9 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1954.261

A detail from the museum

Sets of paintings by royal court artists, such as the Ragamala series from which this page came, were made for sale, rather than for the private collection of the king.

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ward, William. "Three Indian Paintings." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 42, no. 1 (January 1955): 12–15.
• Lee, Sherman. "The Decorative and the Super-Real: Two Rajasthani Miniatures." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 44, no. 8 October 1957): 180-183.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.