Royal Women Celebrating Diwali (c. 1760): Art, History and Details

Royal Women Celebrating Diwali (c. 1760) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Lined along the eaves, the top of the marble lattice railing, and the rims of the boats on the river are candles and butter lamps lit in celebration of a New Year festival. A princess on a golden armchair lights sparklers with her friends. In the boats and on the far shore men set off sparklers under the light of a magnificent firework display under the full moon. The style of this work is typical of Mughal painting from the mid-1700s, when scenes of domestic life among women of the court were a favorite subject for the imperial artists.

Object facts

• Title: Royal Women Celebrating Diwali
• Date: c. 1760
• Culture: Northern India, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 20.5 x 24.7 cm (8 1/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1971.82

A detail from the museum

"Diwali" comes from the Sanskrit words dīpa (lamp) and āvali (rows or series).

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.
• Sugimura, Tō 杉村棟 . Isurāmu [イスラーム = New history of world art, Islam].Tōkyō: Shōgakukan, 1999.

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.