Still Life: Bouquet of Flowers Emerging from the Grass (c. 1750): Art, History and Details

Still Life: Bouquet of Flowers Emerging from the Grass (c. 1750) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Studies of flower arrangements in the European manner became a popular subject in Indian miniature painting during the reign of Mughal emperor Jahangir (reigned 1605–27). Inspired by imported prints, Indian artists rendered them in Mughal fashion. Here, in a painting made at a Rajasthani court, the entire bouquet grows magically out of the ground from a single stem.

Object facts

• Title: Still Life: Bouquet of Flowers Emerging from the Grass
• Date: c. 1750
• Culture: Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput Kingdom of Bundi
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 32.4 x 23.5 cm (12 3/4 x 9 1/4 in.); Miniature: 29.8 x 21.6 cm (11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2018.161

A detail from the museum

The central flower is a scarlet-colored poppy, famed for yielding opium.

Collection credit

Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection; Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

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.