An illustration from the Sunder Shringar: Radha and Krishna lying on a bed within a pavilion Kangra or Guler, circa 1780


gouache and gold on paper, dark blue border, four lines of text in nagari script verso, cover sheet with the stamp of the Royal Library of Mandi 194 x 285 mm.
|ProvenanceAcquired from the Royal Library of Mandi in 1969.Sotheby's, Indian & Southeast Asian Works of Art, New York, 19th March 2008, lot 208.The Sunder Shringar, composed in the mid-17th Century by Sunder Kavi (d. 1689), is a poem dealing with the various moods of love and the classification of heroines (nayika bheda), in some sense comparable to the Rasikapriya of Keshav Das. The series of which the present painting comes uses Radha and Krishna as figures emblematic of courtship and romance, as dealt with in the poem, and in the paintings they work through the various stages of their passion. Twenty-one paintings from this superlative dispersed series appeared at Sotheby's New York between 2005 and 2008. The style seems either contemporary or perhaps a little later than work by the sons of Nainsukh and Manaku. For other paintings from the same series, see Sotheby's New York, 1st April 2005, lot 110-113; 20th September 2005, lot 106-109; 29th March 2006, lot 149-152; 19th September 2006, lots 1-5; 19th March 2008, lot 205-208; 19th September 2008, lots 201-204.