Krishna Steals the Clothes of the Milkmaids and Expounds on the Virtue of Trees, from a Braj Bhagavata Purana (c. 1650): Art, History and Details

Krishna Steals the Clothes of the Milkmaids and Expounds on the Virtue of Trees, from a Braj Bhagavata Purana (c. 1650) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

When the milkmaids went to the Yamuna River to bathe, Krishna stealthily took their clothes and hid them in the treetops. Here, the blue-skinned Krishna sits in a tree playing his flute, waiting for the women to come to him. True devotees must shed all worldly inhibitions and approach their god with nothing to hide. The narrow register above shows Krishna expounding on the virtue of trees to the other cowherds. The illustration closely follows the extensive text, written on the back in the vernacular language of Braj, even down to the detail of how they drank the sweet water of the Yamuna River.

Object facts

• Title: Krishna Steals the Clothes of the Milkmaids and Expounds on the Virtue of Trees, from a Braj Bhagavata Purana
• Date: c. 1650
• Culture: Central India, Madhya Pradesh, Malwa
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 21 x 33.5 cm (8 1/4 x 13 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1986.175

Collection credit

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Walzer

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1986.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 2 (February 1987): 38–79.

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.