A Forlorn Lover
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Gouache |
| Current Location: | National Museum of Asian Art Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. |
| Location History: | The painting passed into the possession of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877 to 1947) by an unknown method of acquisition. He was among the first curators in North America to systematically collect and study Indian miniature painting, and several Pahari works passed through his hands. After Ananda Coomaraswamy's death, the painting was transferred to his son Rama Coomaraswamy (1929 to 2006) in Greenwich, Connecticut. Ralph Benkaim (1914 to 2001) of Beverly Hills, California purchased the painting from Rama Coomaraswamy in May 1972. Ralph and Catherine Glynn Benkaim were collectors of Indian painting. Mr. Benkaim was an entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles who began collecting Indian painting in 1961. Dr. Catherine Glynn Benkaim is a scholar in the field of Indian painting. The couple met in the 1970s when she was the curator of Indian painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and married in 1979. Together they assembled a collection of Indian paintings covering all genres. Objects from their collection are also held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Following Ralph Benkaim's death in 2001, Catherine Glynn Benkaim held the painting by inheritance until 2018. In 2018 the painting was acquired by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery through a partial gift and purchase from Catherine Glynn Benkaim, funded by the Friends of the National Museum of Asian Art. |
'A Forlorn Lover, Fragment from a Rasamanjari' is a painting attributed to the workshop of Golu of Nurpur, produced in Himachal Pradesh around 1710 to 1715. It is a fragment, meaning it was separated from a larger folio at some point before it entered documented institutional ownership. The painting illustrates one of the 384 types of female lover classified in the Rasamanjari of Bhanudatta Mishra. The Rasamanjari is a poetic classification of lovers and love situations. It was composed around 1500 by Maithili Brahmin Bhanudatta, probably in Ahmednagar in the Deccan, and its Sanskrit verses had a significant impact on Hindu court painting and the development of the Hindi literary tradition known as ritikal. The central figure is described as a lotus-eyed woman with henna-tipped fingers. She appears to be an experienced nayika, or heroine, waiting for her lover. She is fully adorned in jewelry and sits by a bed. Bhanudatta describes such a nayika in the following verse: "She put on all her jewelry, perfumed her thick head of hair, and at her bedside had them place areca nut and betel leaf. And the bedroom, when the woman entered, her body all aglow, was a darkened overcast day set ablaze by golden ketaki flowers." The forlorn quality signalled by the painting's title refers to a specific emotional state within the Rasamanjari's taxonomy of love. The nayika shown here is not weeping nor in active distress. She is waiting, adorned and prepared, in a state of anticipation that the poet characterises through the contrast between her luminous, decorated appearance and the darkened room around her. The ketaki flower mentioned in the verse is a fragrant night-blooming plant associated in Sanskrit poetry with longing and the season of rains. Its inclusion connects the nayika's waiting to a natural world that mirrors her emotional state. This treatment of the female figure as a precisely classified emotional type is central to the function of Rasamanjari painting. The poem did not exist simply as literature to be read. It was used at court as a system for categorising and discussing the emotional states of love, and the paintings made to illustrate it served as visual reference points for those discussions. The nayika in this folio is not an individual but a type: a woman whose specific combination of experience, adornment and solitary waiting places her in one of Bhanudatta's 384 categories. The painting's visual language draws directly from the Nurpur school tradition inherited by Golu from his father Devidasa and grandfather Kripal. The palette is bold and saturated, with strong contrast between the figure and the background. The architectural elements that frame the scene, the bed and the interior space, are rendered in the flat, schematic manner characteristic of early Pahari painting, which prioritised emotional immediacy over spatial illusionism.