Farewell at night

'Farewell at Night', a folio from a Rasamanjari series, dated 1710 to 1720 and attributed to the artist Golu of Nurpur (active ca. 1710 to 1750). It is catalogued as pigment on paper, a sheet of some eight and a half by twelve and a half inches with a painted field of roughly seven by ten and a half, now held in the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, Switzerland on permanent loan from Eberhard and Barbara Fischer. Golu belonged to a hereditary workshop at Nurpur in the Punjab Hills where his grandfather Kripal and his father Devidasa had each illustrated the same Sanskrit text before him. That text was the Rasamanjari of Bhanudatta, composed in Tirhut around the turn of the sixteenth century as a catalogue of lovers and their moods, and by the time Golu took it up around 1715 it had become something close to a family inheritance. Kripal cast the god Krishna as the hero and Devidasa replaced him with a prince, while Golu kept the prince and gave him the features of his patron Raja Daya Dhata who ruled from 1700 to 1735. Sketches and compositions passed down the family together with the poem, so that Golu worked less as an inventor than as the custodian of a visual argument his elders had already begun. The sheet is built on a hard division. The left half is a single unbroken field of deep aubergine in which five stylised trees with golden rounded crowns stand in two tiers on low green mounds and nothing else is permitted to enter. At the right a white pavilion framed by blue pillars and cusped arches opens beneath striped eaves of yellow and red where a princely man in a saffron jama and an orange turban pinned with a feather stands with his palms drawn together before a woman reclining on a pink bolster. Her head is thrown back against a raised arm and her body slackens into the red of her skirt and the dark veil falling from her shoulders while a black doorway behind them leads nowhere the eye can follow. A narrow band of blue stippled with white dots runs across the top as the night sky and a red border presses in on every side. Nothing is described that the story does not need. The architecture is flat and the trees are emblems and the darkness is applied as colour rather than rendered as atmosphere, a convention carried over from the older Basohli manner and softened here by a finer profile and a gentler face for the man than his predecessors allowed. The materials are those of the hill workshops. Opaque mineral and earth pigments were ground and bound in gum then laid thickly over burnished paper so that the saffron of the jama and the saturated red of the margin keep the polished flatness that marks the Nurpur tradition at its strongest. Earlier members of the family set the wing cases of jewel beetles into painted ornaments and raised small dots of shell lime in relief, and the bright points along her jewellery and across his sleeve recall that habit although only technical examination could confirm what the surface actually holds. Scholars have judged Golu's Rasamanjari series uneven in quality and have suspected the hands of assistants within it, so this folio is best read as the product of a studio working under his name rather than necessarily the work of one brush. Its place in the history of Pahari painting is that of a threshold, still anchored in the expressive colour of Basohli yet already leaning toward the calmer naturalism that later hill courts would refine. The scene appears to correspond to the heroine who anticipates separation, one of the nayika types through which Bhanudatta sorted the states of love. Her stillness is the point. The verse praises the woman who hears of her lover's departure without a sigh or a tear, and the lock of hair that falls across her brow is traditionally read as a sign that she has fainted, so the painting holds both readings in one gesture of composure above and collapse beneath. The man's open palms and bare feet place him at the threshold in the last moment before leaving. What the picture withholds is the departure itself. The dark field beside the pavilion is where he will go and where she will wait, an emptiness that the trees mark without relieving. In the aesthetics of rasa the viewer is not asked to pity but to taste, to become the connoisseur for whom separation deepens the sweetness of union by threatening it. The hero may be Krishna in one reading and a prince in another and the woman any woman who has been left, which is the purpose of sorting lovers into types at all. Court audiences trained on the verses would have recognised the poem in the image before they noticed the pigment, and in a region where Vaishnava devotion taught that longing is the surest proof of love the folio reduces night and parting and restraint to a pavilion and a field of dark.