Ladies at Bangles’ Shop Lot n° 42

Specifications: Watercolor Painting On Paper Artist: Navneet Parikh 10.3 inches X 13.3 inches This brilliant painting, a contemporary artwork rendered in miniature format of late Mughal art-style of around 1830-40 practised primarily at Mughal Subas – provincial headquarters like Oudh, though in all other things – theme and ambience in particular, revealing Rajasthani character, represents two damsels at a bangles’ shop where the shop’s owner is giving them a trial by putting on bangles on the wrist of one of them for determining its size, suitability of colour and overall look. In perfect execution, fine iconography and anatomical proportions, modeling and finish, figures’ gesticulation, mild colour tones and depth perspective, besides overall sophistication, the painting pursues norms of Provincial Mughal art style, though the character of the shop’s architecture, style of costumes, kind of textiles used in them and prints’ patterns, and the items put on sale – articles made of lac, bangles and jewellery boxes in particular, are typically Rajasthani. An identical shop, its proto-model, built in 1730s, might be still discovered in symmetrically built rows of shops at one of the bazaars in Sawai Jai Singh’s medieval Pink City Jaipur. This medievalism might be seen revealing also in dozens of shops at Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bikaner, Ajmer and other old towns of Rajasthan not merely in the character of their architecture but also in the articles they sell – bangles, wears, jewellery, artifacts and things of day-today use. In the shape of these bangles and other mirrors- inlaid and lac-coated articles Rajasthan makes its presence felt world-over as also in far-gone seventeenth-eighteenth centuries in the form of their painted versions in miniatures of those days. A raised carpeted floor affording seating space for both, the shop-owner as well as the buyer, arched brackets manipulating corners, and a well moulded and gilded