Krishna being dressed in women’s clothes for the spring festival Holi (c. 1790): Art, History and Details

Krishna being dressed in women’s clothes for the spring festival Holi (c. 1790) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The Hindu festival of Holi, which celebrates the arrival of spring, is a time of play that encourages reckless joy and abandon. The women cheekily dress Krishna as one of them. Radha, his beloved, takes away his crown and flute. This unfinished work reveals the process of creating an Indian painting. An experienced member of the atelier would have made the drawing and written the color notations before giving it to a colorist to paint.

Object facts

• Title: Krishna being dressed in women’s clothes for the spring festival Holi
• Date: c. 1790
• Culture: Northern India, Pahari kingdoms
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Ink and gum tempera on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 19 x 27.4 cm (7 1/2 x 10 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1933.453

A detail from the museum

A few preliminary patches of color in the foreground indicate the palette intended to be applied to the entire painting.

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., and India Society. Indian Drawings. London: Printed for the India Society at the Essex House Press, 1910.
• Leach, Linda York. Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.

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.