Fruits Seller’s Shop Lot n° 44

Specifications: Watercolor on Paper Artist Navneet Parikh 10.0 inches X 13.0 inches The painting, a twenty-first century miniature endowed with stylistic distinction of medieval Indian art as practised around the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Mughals’ art-world, especially at their provincial seats like Oudh and Murshidabad, a brilliant piece of art, portrays a fruits-seller’s shop with two ladies buying some fruits, perhaps apples, from it. The painting has been framed in a lavish elaborate border comprising floral arabesques rendered in gold. The painting has great Mughalia touch in its eagerness for details, subdued colour tones, depth perspective, figures’ anatomical balance and modeling, features’ sharpness and skin’s transparent colour, besides symmetrically arranged parts and geometrical proportions as reveal in semi-hexagonal placing of wooden fruit-cases. The shop, structured over fluted tapering marble columns with lotus-bases on either side, arched brackets managing the corners, and a beautifully moulded and gold-painted lintel, is a brilliant piece of medieval Rajasthani architecture the best examples of which Sawai Jai Singh’s Pink City Jaipur presented some three hundred years before. In addition, the shop has extending over it a beautiful red canopy painted in gold. With its velvet-like look it extends from under the eave over the shop’s front. The shop’s floor, as usual, is raised to some height though unlike the more often pursued practice in medieval days, it does not provide seating space for buyers, perhaps in consideration of the nature of business involved in sale-and-purchase of fruits-like commodity taking hardly any time. The shop’s floor stands covered to its outer edge with fruits’ baskets. Besides the semi-hexagonally placed wooden racks storing bananas, sweet-melons, both streaked and uni-coloured, mangoes, apples, grapes, figs among others, the shop has bunches of grape