Detail View: The AMICA Library: A Lady Playing the Tanpura

The Kishangarh atelier is renowned not only for paintings but also for large-scale drawings that were tinted and highly finished. Images of women drinking wine, holding flowers, or playing instruments became a popular genre in Rajasthani painting during the first half of the eighteenth century. They evolved from imperial Mughal depictions of large concert parties in which female entertainers served an auxiliary function. Here one such entertainer has been transformed into a "nayika," an idealized Hindu heroine and personification of female beauty. She has just plucked a string of her tanpura (a drone instrument of the lute family, played by women) and is intently listening to its resonance. The drawing must date from before the 1740s, at which time a more idiosyncratic and exaggerated facial type became the vogue in Kishangarh.