Artwork Page for Leaf from a Kalighat album: Maid bringing a hookah to a lady (recto); Krishna weighed against precious objects(?) (verso)

Details / Information for Leaf from a Kalighat album: Maid bringing a hookah to a lady (recto); Krishna weighed against precious objects(?) (verso)

Leaf from a Kalighat album: Maid bringing a hookah to a lady (recto); Krishna weighed against precious objects(?) (verso)

c. 1890

Eastern India, Bengal, Kolkata, Kalighat

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Medium
Gum tempera, graphite, ink, and tin on paper; Woodcut, hand colored with gum tempera
Measurements
Secondary Support: 48.6 x 30.1 cm (19 1/8 x 11 7/8 in.); Recto Image: 45.8 x 27.5 cm (18 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.)
Credit Line
Gift of William E. Ward in memory of his wife, Evelyn Svec Ward 2003.107
Public Domain
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Location
Not on view
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Description

Kalighat paintings reflect the time and context in which they were created. Kalighat painters used their medium to offer penetrating and insightful critiques of British-influenced Indians as well as the British themselves through satires and caricatures. Newly rich Bengali native Indian clerks (babus) aspired to dress and behave like their British masters, and Kalighat painters taunted them for this.

The maid, dressed in green, holds a hookah in her right hand. The lady in red is likely a fashionable high society concubine or prostitute known and depicted at this time as hookah-smoking, makeup-wearing, paan- (betel leaf with areca nut and lime paste) chewing hussies. The wealth created by the East India Company made it possible for Bengali babu dandies to have concubines and pay for prostitutes.
A vertically oriented gum tempera painting and a horizontally oriented hand-colored woodcut are displayed together. The painting depicts two women with yellow skin tones in patterned green and red garments; one holds a long pipe toward the other. The woodcut features figures with medium skin tones gathered around a large balance scale near a building. A decorative border frames the woodcut, and a tree sits on our right. Both occupy plain backgrounds.

Leaf from a Kalighat album: Maid bringing a hookah to a lady (recto); Krishna weighed against precious objects(?) (verso)

c. 1890

Eastern India, Bengal, Kolkata, Kalighat

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