Royal lovers watching rain clouds: The month of Bhadon, from a Barahmasa (c. 1790): Art, History and Details

Royal lovers watching rain clouds: The month of Bhadon, from a Barahmasa (c. 1790) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A king enjoys a stormy evening in the women’s quarters of the palace. A woman guards the door; another holds the royal fly whisk. He gestures toward two women playing instruments, but the king and his beloved have eyes only for one another as they tenderly touch hands. This painting comes from a series that depicts scenes associated with each month of the Hindu calendar. Bhadon straddles August and September toward the end of the monsoon season when rivers are swollen, and rainstorms prevent travel and warfare. For this reason, men remain at home, and Bhadon is famed as a month for lovemaking.

Object facts

• Title: Royal lovers watching rain clouds: The month of Bhadon, from a Barahmasa
• Date: c. 1790
• Culture: Northern India, Pahari kingdoms
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 13 x 9 cm (5 1/8 x 3 9/16 in.); Overall: 20.7 x 15.2 cm (8 1/8 x 6 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1973.104

A detail from the museum

The oval format became popular after the 1760s with the expansion of British presence in India.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "The Year in Review for 1973." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 2 (February 1974): 31–78.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• 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.