AN ILLUSTRATION FROM A RASIKA PRIYA SERIES: RADHA AND KRISHNA ON A MOONLIT TERRACE
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE AMERICAN COLLECTION
Attributable to Sajnu, Mandi, Northern India, ca. 1810 - 1820

Opaque pigments heightened with gold on wove wasli paper, the elegantly drawn vertical composition depicting a moment of intimacy at night between Radha and Krishna, their intertwined bodies lying on a low bed under a floral palanquin on a moonlit terrace, their gazes locked into each other's eyes imbuing the painting with great emotional charge, Radha's sakhi (confidante) and a female attendant confabulating in a room nearby, the background filled with the architectural setting of the palace and lush exotic vegetation, set within black and white rules, and concentric decorative borders with green and pink squares on a golden ground and dark blue ground, the reverse with several lines of black ink annotations in a local Indian script, 26cm x 20.3cm.

Provenance: purchased from the private collection of Francisco Garcia in New York.

The celebrated artist Sajnu, a Guler court painter seeking employment under the Mandi ruler Raja Ishvari Sen (r. 1788 - 1826), is one of the greatest talents in the early 19th-century Pahari schools. His creations, strongly influenced by the canons established by Kangra and Guler paintings of the same period, revolutionised the pictorial style and vocabulary of the small Mandi atelier in the Indian Himachal Pradesh province. Indeed, he moved away from the robust and strident palette of precedent productions in favour of softer tonalities and a quieter palette (W. G. Archer, Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills. A Survey and History of Pahari Miniature Painting, 1973, Vol. I, pp. 360 - 361). Despite his predilection for compositions in oval format, several relevant elements in the present lot link this painting to Sajnu and his circle in Mandi, especially the delicate rendering of the figures' bodies, the brightness of their textiles and floral floorspread, and the pale colours of the architecture with niches and chhajjas towers in the background.

For an almost identical illustration from a Rasika Priya series in vertical format attributed to Sajnu, please see Sotheby's New York, 16 March 2016, lot 831, and 21 March 2019, lot 976.