India, Madhya Pradesh, Raghogarh, ca. 1680
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
23.5 x 18.4 cm
Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection—funds provided by the Friends of the Freer and Sackler Galleries
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
S2018.1.32
In Amit Dutta’s films Nainsukh and Gita Govinda, we see the traditional process of making paintings using squirrel-hair brushes and pigment-filled seashells. In this seventeenth-century painting, seashells filled with color, silver water pots, oblong orange cases for paintbrushes, and a pair of scissors surround a painter. She is not a historical artist, but rather an archetypal heroine yearning for her lover. To assuage her longing, she paints a portrait of her beloved. Her maidservant waves a peacock feather to cool her mistress’s burning desire, but with no success. The empty bedchamber further emphasizes the lover’s absence.
Zoom into her portrait; intriguingly, her lover is a yogi with his dreadlocks piled atop his head and a long scraggly beard on his face.
In Nainsukh, Amit Dutta breathes new life into the painter’s old creations, reviving the intimacy of the grand worlds of the past through the time-defying medium of cinema. You can stream it here.
Dutta’s short film Gita Govinda employs audio cues and a virtuosic collage style to bring the dynamic compositions by Nainsukh’s artistic heirs to life. You can stream it here.