AN EQUESTRIAN PORTRAIT OF MARU RAGAPUTRA OF MALKOS RAGA Bilaspur or Chamba, India, early 18th century  Opaque pigments and gold on paper, the vertical composition depicting Maru Ragaputra, son of Malkos, wearing a red jama with mailed gloves and helmet on a dappled horse, holding a long spear ready to strike, on his forehead the typical Vaishnavite tilaka with three vertical lines (urdhva pundra), his horse bleeding near the arrow wounds, a Rajput soldier mortally wounded lying on the foreground, to the left another Rajput footsoldier with Shiva's devotees tilaka three horizontal lines (tripundra) on his forehead, holding his dhal up ready to receive Maru's blow, within white rules and bright red borders, the verso inscribed in black ink takri and nagari script and the numbers 89 and 2515 in Indian numerals in pencil, the last one the Mandi royal inventory number, mounted on a white cardboard frame, 21.4cm x 15.2cm excluding the mounting.  Provenance: Formerly in the Royal Mandi Collection;      then into the private hands of a German collector.  Inscription:  (takri) raga maru / 1 /ma and raga maru malakose da putra     (nagari) raga maru malakause da putra     Maru raga [first] son of Malakausa This painting is f.89 from a dispersed album that was once in the Mandi royal collection. Pages from the album are now scattered in various public and private collections. Cathy Glynn has traced the album’s presence from its inscriptions in the Kangra royal library of the Maharani Odaroli, but some time afterwards it was moved to Mandi where it was rebound in 1841 (Glynn, Skelton and Dallapiccola, Ragamala: Paintings from India, London, 2011, pp. 34-36). Most of the paintings are of typical Hindu-Rajput subjects such as Ragas, Raginis and Ragaputras belonging to the Pahari system of musical modes, as well as avatars of Vishnu and other deities.   Glynn believes the album was actually prepared in Chamba 1690-1700 on account of a similarity in the hanging fold of the turban over the neck found occasionally in Chamba as in a wood carving of c. 1650 (ibidem, pp. 34-35). However, there are close resemblances in the iconography of this series with later ragamala paintings from Bilaspur, where earlier publications placed the album. Bilaspur was one of the few Pahari states to produce vertical Ragamalas at this date, so the precise provenance remains for the moment open.