A Princess Standing on a Small Gold Plinth, India / Mughal or Northern Deccan, Late 17th - early 18th century

Sotheby's London, 22nd April 2015, lot 155.

Prahlad Bubbar, London.

This refined album folio depicts a standing female figure - perhaps a flesh and blood princess or an idealized celestial beauty - standing nearly naked at her toilette - her damp black hair falling in wavy curls. Depicted against a deep black ground that lends the composition a nocturnal sense of intimacy with a band of evening sky above. The figure stands in an elegant contrapposto on a small gilded wooden platform (chowki), her head gracefully inclined and her gaze averted in an expression of pensive reverie.

She is draped in an orange dupatta (shawl) that cascades from her head to her feet, the vivid pigment burnished in subtle gradations to suggest the fall of cloth across her figure. A transparent pleated night-skirt wafts at her ankles. Delicate jewelry: armbands, pearl choker necklace and earrings signify her courtly rank. Pink blossoms are scattered at her feet - a poetic device often employed in Mughal and Deccani painting to evoke the garden setting so beloved in Persian-influenced poetic verse.

Her portrait is set within an orange and gold inner border mounted within a sumptuous royal blue album (muraqqa) page and finely decorated with inter-twining gold and polychrome floral arabesques.  The chrysanthemums, marigolds, and hybrid blossoms all rendered with naturalistic delicacy.  As a charming detail two fluttering orange and gold designs seem to delicately animate the border in the upper and lower right margins.  

The work was perhaps produced for an imperial or higher ranking princely patron.  The quality of the border illumination appears consistent with the manner of Mughal and Northern Deccani workshop production after the reign of Aurangzeb - or his later successors.