A double-sided album page: Krishna and Radha standing on a bed, Kota, attributable to painter C, circa 1720-40; a noblewoman visits a lingam shrine at night, India, Provincial Mughal, late 18th century

gouache with gold on paper, both sides border bands of coloured paper decorated with gold foliate scrolls

The Kota scene of Krishna and Radha is close in style to the work of the artist dubbed by Beach as painter C of the early Kota masters (see Beach in Beach, Fischer and Goswamy, Masters of Indian Painting 1650-1900, vol.II, pp.459-478). In particular it is similar to a painting of Krishna and Radha in a bower (ibid, p.475, fig.18), which also shares very similar borders to the present work. Five further early eigtheenth-century Kota works from a single album with very similar borders to the present work were published by Spink and Son in 1987, one of which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art from the Bellak Collection (see Ehnbom and Topsfield, Indian Miniature Painting, Spink and Son Ltd., London, November-December 1987, nos.18-21), and another was published by Sam Fogg in 1999 (Fantoni, Indian Paintings and Manuscripts, Sam Fogg Ltd., London, 1999, pp.70-71, no.44), and another is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Thus it seems likely that all nine of these early eighteenth-century Kota works were originally part of the same album, which also included a mixture of Jaipur and provincial Mughal works.

The Mughal scene of a noblewoman worshipping a lingham shrine at night may relate to the iconography of Bhairavi Ragini.