Sugriva (c. 1720): Art, History and Details

Sugriva (c. 1720) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The seated monkey king Sugriva presents the “fear not” gesture with his right hand. He served as Rama’s faithful ally during the war against Ravana. This work appears to have been made for French Jesuit missionaries by South Indian temple muralists. During the 1700s, missionaries commissioned sets of paintings from which they learned about the gods and literary figures popular among the people of the region.

Object facts

• Title: Sugriva
• Date: c. 1720
• Culture: Southern India, Andhra Pradhesh
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and hand-colored silver paper appliqué on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 35.5 x 23.5 cm (14 x 9 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1975.73

A detail from the museum

Instead of gold, artists applied strips of paper, colored with a mixture of silver paint and an organic yellow pigment called gamboge.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Ward

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1975.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 63, no. 2 (1976): 31–71.
• Leach, Linda York. Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Oriental Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 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.