Raja Balwant Singh [watching a dancer]

Raja Balwant Singh [viewing a dancer] ca. 1750, painted by Nainsukh (ca. 1710–1778). A large, consciously spare, folio rendered in gouache on paper, the two sheets joined by a centrally placed seam that, unabashed, announces itself. The background, instead of cool, blank primed paper, is warm, aged tan, like the wall in high noon; like old ivory. It is this color that announces that time is already passing through the painting. Balwant Singh is pictured on the left, recumbent on dark bolsters under a canopy of deep navy fabric blooming with stylized floral patterns whose chevron border is sharp and precise, supported by four thin, airy poles. He is smoking his huqqa, with the relaxed and deliberate ease of a man whose certainty of his leisure requires only the thin black pipe snaking from his hand to the ornate brass base; its spirals at rest between patron and ground. His white 'jama' is decorated, his turban sat with assurance, he doesn't lean forward but is watching properly. Across the vast, open, deliberate center of the composition, a female dancer turns amid a gesture of pink and yellow silk, turning her body as the arc of her movement carries her from the lone spectator on the left to the press of musicians on the right; behind her, six or seven figures robed in white huddle, one on the ground playing a long stringed instrument, the others standing and singing and watching, one holding a small percussion instrument. The white robes cluster in one mass of paleness and motion, highlighted by yellow turbans, a touch of orange cummerbund, a small blue cap. This is what Nainsukh, unlike anyone else painting in Pahari tradition, does with such efficiency: he makes space work for him. The large, empty center of the picture-which in the hand of another artist would be mistaken for failure, an unfinished job-is the picture itself: it is the space between the watching king and the rotating performer; it is attention in solid form; it is the painter recording not the spectacle, but the look on the face of one man who, private, unhurried, master of his time, enjoys it.