An Illustration to a Gita Govinda Series: Radha Sends a Message to Krishna, India, Mewar, circa 1680

Charlotte A. Watson Fund, 1934.

Collection of Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

The poet Jayadeva and his companion are pictured on a small green hillock at lower right engaged in discourse. Above them is Radha seated alone on the barren earth. She is lonely, lost in thought, dreaming about her beloved Krishna, seen on the far left seated beneath a flowering bower within a cinnabar ground. A confidant carries Radha’s message of longing to Krishna. Jayadeva eloquently relates Radha’s pining for her cherished Krishna in his verse.  

This rare painting is from a late-seventeenth Century Gita Govinda series executed during the reign of Maharana Jai Singh (r. 1680-98) from the royal Mewar workshop after the period of Sahibdin. The convention of arranging the pictorial setting in a horizontal format with the landscape and vegetation used as scene separators was established during this period and continued to be employed over the next six decades to produce innumerable manuscripts illustrating this and other epics – Ramayana, Bhagavata Purana, Rasikapriya and others, created in the Udaipur workshops.

Another Gita Govinda folio from a similar series is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, accession no. 1975.409.3. An earlier Gita Govinda painting from Mewar of circa 1665 date attributed to Sahibdin is also in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no. 1988.103. Its squarish horizontal format was likely the immediate precursor to the present type. 

See Andrew Topsfield, Court Painting at Udaipur, Artibus Asiae, Zurich, 2001, pp. 53-84 for more discussion on paintings from Mewar.