The work was acquired in 2005 via the John L. Severance Fund, one of the museum's primary acquisition endowments.
Currently housed in the Indian Art Collection with the Department of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
'Two Elephants Fighting in a Courtyard Before Muhammad Shah', c. 1730-40. Attributed to Nainsukh (c. 1710-1778). This monumental, grand and ambitious early folio is rendered in gum tempera, ink and gold on paper; two large pieces joined vertically at a central seam, which is deliberately left unhidden, bisecting the painting into two distinct realms. Structurally, the space is brutally segmented with a vast, pale area as the central courtyard with an equally plain red wall that isolates the serene extravagance of the imperial court above from the brutal game happening below.
The Emperor Muhammad Shah occupies a central 'jharokha', poised in detached regal stance under a delicately pale pink awning and geometric screen walls. From this safely distanced imperial balcony, he quietly smokes his 'hookah'. While on either side, faces tentatively peep from behind the delicately latticed windows, offering us another layer of invisible observation possibly royal women and their palace maids looking for a glimpse.
Across the wide, dust-churned lower foreground two large dark war-elephants collide into each other with a tangle of trunks and legs. Nainsukh focuses all the narrative tension and all the sudden, vulnerable, human aspect to the two figures in the bottom right and left; on the right, a mahout wearing a pink tunic slides helplessly from his charging disbalanced animal. His limbs akimbo in an unconscious gesture of free-fall toward the ground, the tip of his discarded 'ankush' (elephant goad) gleaming on the empty earth below, symbolising a separation of absolute power from brute nature. On either side of the warring tuskers stand attendants in vibrant pinks, reds and greens, running toward the conflict with long spears and flashing, fire-belching 'charkhis' (fire-crackers), attempting to tear apart the two animals with force.
What Nainsukh does here by importing the 17th-century Mughal Padshahnama structures into the early regional style is to do all the psychic work by means of scale and of architectural divisions, using the enormous space of the plain, pale dividing courtyard wall between the viewing emperor and the colliding elephants, as a buffer, of silent watching, between the sovereign power and the violent risk.
The description of the painting is very well written. What I find most intruiging is that it is beautifully and mindfully observed. Every minute detail from the painting is captured and described. The description is also accurately researched with relevant resources, providing authentic factual proofs of the artwork. The colourgrading in the painting is to be adorned of which is rightly described here. The different colour shades, the theme, the background and the etnic colour changing according to the characters is superely precise. The Emepror too is described very well whilst the two enormous elephants being the central characters of the painting.
