King Riding a Horse Composed Maidens Lot n° 43

Specifications: Water Color Painting on Paper Artist:Kailash Raj 7 inch x 9.5 inch A delightfully curious feast to eye, unusual anatomy the creation ofmere fancy, the painting combines with a grotesque horse the figure ofa normal human being riding it. An early experimentation in art,initially such grotesque forms composed of female figures confinedmostly to an elephant form. Known in Sanskrit as ‘kunjara’ suchelephant form was identified as ‘nari-kunjara’, an elephant composedof women figures. Subsequently, grotesque forms of other animals :horse, camel, lion, peacock …, composed similarly of women figures andidentically named by the names of such animals, and sometimes, all as‘nari-kunjara’, also emerged on canvas. In most of the paintings ofsuch forms their both components, the animal and its rider, had agrotesque looking form. The cult of such grotesque animal forms hasbeen in equal prevalence also in Chinese, Egyptian, Christian andCentral Asian mythologies since early times.This painting, rendered in characteristic Rajasthani style asprevailed at Jaipur around the late eighteenth century, representsNari-kunjara with the form of the horse sometimes called nari-ashva –the horse composed of a number of female forms, but unlike most of thegrotesque paintings where human figures are also grotesque-looking,the rider in this painting is a normal human being, a king, thoughwith his body painted in blue imitating Lord Krishna’s body-colour andattired and crowned identically to Krishna wearing Krishna-likepeacock feather crown, a large garland of colourful fresh flowers likeLord Vishnu’s Vaijayanti, a halo around his face and the love-godKamadeva like carrying the sword composed of flowers, that is, he hasKrishna-like fascinating being, Vishnu-like prowess, and Kamadeva-likepower to move passion. The lavishly bejeweled figure of the king isputting on a lehenga-like lower wear consisting of maroon silk lengthrichly broca