Opaque pigment on paper heightened with gold
c. 1810-1820
“There is a haunting charm in the gentle shyness of the bride… We may almost feel the wild beating of her heart and the tremulous touch of her red-stained fingers…”
Ananda K Coomaraswamy, Rajput Painting, 1916, p.64
This charming painting depicts the Navodha Nayika, the newly-wed heroine, as she approaches the wedding chamber. The bride's steps are hesitant, her head bowed in coy anticipation. To her side, an elderly duenna, offers a calming presence. The current composition is based on an earlier painting formerly in the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, that has been attributed to an artist of the first generation after Manaku and Nainsukh, which reflects the height of refinement and sophistication in the Guler court atelier, (see B. Goswamy and E. Fischer, Pahari Masters, Court Painters of Northern India, Artibus Asiae Supplement XXXVIII, Zurich, 1992, p.348). The current work would have been painted by an artist who clearly had access to that painting, but it is probably painted a generation later in the first half of the 19th Century.