A scene from the Bhagavata Purana, ascribed to Manaku of Guler, Pahari, Guler, circa 1740

This illustration is from an important set of drawings which are part of a Bhagavata Purana series produced at Guler about 1740. The series is attributed by Goswamy and Fischer to Manaku of Guler (see Goswamy and Fischer 1992. nos.109-110, pp.246, 262-263; for further discussion see Ohri 1998, p.162; Ohri 2001, pls.12-14). Other drawings from the same series are in several collections including the Rietberg Museum, Zurich and the collection of Dr Jyoti and Nona Datta, Los Angeles. Lots 61 and 62 in this sale are also from the same series.

Manaku was the elder brother of the painter Nainsukh and son of Pandit Seu. A portrait by his younger brother depicts him in his mid-forties with a tilak on his forehead, a double crescent line with a dot below indicating that he was a devotee of Devi, the great goddess. Believed to have been born around 1700, Manaku lived and worked all his life at Guler (Goswamy and Fischer 1992, p. 243). The Guler Ramayana of circa 1720, although the work of his father Pandit Seu, would have been the training ground for Manaku. In the Siege of Lanka series, Manaku's young energy is evident in the larger format paintings and drawings that have a greater awareness of naturalism. This was followed by the Gita Govinda of 1730, where Manaku's name appears in the colophon. In 1735 Manaku began his Bhagavata Purana series, that was typically 'dense in narrative and sequence...  and can be seen as another step along the road of innovation and detailed narrative that Manaku had set out earlier' (ibid, p.244).  Goswamy and Fischer identify parallels with the earlier Gita Govinda and Siege of Lanka and also with Pandit Seu's Ramayana. As with the Siege of Lanka, the Bhagavata Purana was left unfinished, but where the paintings end, a series of drawings continue the narrative, to which the present and following drawings belong. Few of these drawings have been published, but they all appear to have been numbered. It is believed that the series comprised nearly one thousand folios and would have taken several years to produce.