Scenes of Krishna, Radha, and her companion, and the poet Jayadeva
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Gouache |
| Current Location: | Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom |
| Location History: | The Ashmolean Museum specifically records Udaipur as the place of creation. The painting was produced in 1629 for the Mewar court during the reign of Maharana Jagat Singh I (1628–1652). |
A 1629 miniature painting from the Mewar school, attributed to Sahibdin, one of the leading painters associated with the court of Udaipur, depicts scenes of Krishna, Radha and her companion and the poet Jayadeva, who gave the world the Gitagovinda, the 12th century Sanskrit poem recounting the love story of the Hindu god Krishna and his beloved Radha. The Ashmolean believes that this painting belongs to a series that was dispersed and that was Sahibdin’s very first commission when he was appointed as court painter to Maharana Jagat Singh I of Udaipur. The painting portrays a number of successive scenes of the story in the same picture. Radha recounts to her female companion or sakhi the episodes in her meetings with Krishna. In the picture Krishna is seen conversing with Radha, embracing and decorating her braided hair with flowers. An odd feature of the narrative is that it suggests that Krishna might be confusing Radha for her companion, whom he is at that moment in love with. At the lower part of the picture Jayadeva is shown reciting his verses while playing the cymbals, thus directly associating the visual image with its literary source. The painting displays the early maturity of Sahibdin’s style, particularly his skill at transforming poetry into a sequence of linked visual scenes; the way it combines human figures, narrative action and a decorative landscape is in line with the particular storytelling tradition of Mewar miniature painting.