Todi Ragini, from a Ragamala Series (c. 1755): Art, History and Details

Todi Ragini, from a Ragamala Series (c. 1755) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Ragamala paintings were recognized as being associated with a season and time of day. Evoking a late morning in spring, here a young woman beguiles deer from the woodlands with her music to prevent them from destroying the crops in the field. The saturated hues and romantic idealization of the scene continue idioms begun in the Mughal court that were disseminated to regional centers of patronage such as Murshidabad. The inscription at the top of this page identifies the name, ragini todi, in Arabic script, which suggests that this ragamala series was made for a Muslim patron.

Object facts

• Title: Todi Ragini, from a Ragamala Series
• Date: c. 1755
• Culture: Eastern India, Bengal, Murshidabad, 18th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 28.6 x 19 cm (11 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.); Miniature: 23.5 x 15.3 cm (9 1/4 x 6 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.340

Collection credit

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

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.