SAWANT SINGH AND BANI THANI ATTRIBUTED TO NIHAL CHAND

Sam Fogg Ltd., London
Acquired circa 1999

Some surface stains and minor wrinkling, visible diagonal crease from middle right to lower left edge of paper. Ink spots at lower right and left. Surface abrasions. Verso: Small stains showing through and minor old repairs and reinforced areas at edges. Conservation framed.
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The poet Maharaja Sawant Singh of Kishangarh offers a small cup of intoxicating liquor, poured from his flask, to his consort Bani Thani.  She holds a small plate containing a single round fruit, as she demurely parts her veil.  An empty bed in the nearby pavilion visible through an open window.

This lovely drawing of the famous lovers Sawant Singh and Bani Thani exemplifies the elegant Kishangarh manner with its elongated figures, sway-backed stances (particularly here of the Raja) and sharp-profile faces with elongated crescent-form eyes - idealized in Kishangarh as the love of Krishna for Radha.  Kishangarh was an important center of Vaishnavite worship and the idealization of the theme of Radha and Krishna was a constantly reoccurring subject in painting there.

The artist Nihal Chand (1710-1782) was perhaps the most influential court artist of Maharaja Sawant Singh (1699-1764) of Kishangarh and is credited with establishing the characteristics most famously associated with paintings from Kishangarh i.e. the curving elongated eye, sharply angular face, combined with slender sway-backed figures - as visible in the present drawing.  Our drawing was executed by a very fine and confident hand from the workshop of Nihal Chand and is almost certainly attributable to the brush of the master himself.

For a drawing almost surely by the same hand and attributed by Stuart Cary Welch to Nihal Chand see  S. C. Welch, Indian Drawings and Painted Sketches, New York, 1976, pp. 120-121, cat.68.