2-745-078 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Morning Toilette, 1810-25. The woman featured in the center embodies the poetic ideal of a female beauty, called a nayika, which translates as "heroine," though she is not an individual from a specific story. In this scene four handmaidens attend to her after the bath. One dries her leg with a white cloth, and another brings her garments for the day folded neatly in a basin. A third holds a mirror for her to use while putting on her jewelry, selected from the box brought by the fourth attendant. The pots of bath water are amid the flowering plants in front of the hexagonal stool on which she stands. The kings of Chamba, a territory deep in the western Himalayas, employed artists from their neighboring kingdom of Guler to create paintings such as this for their royal collections to be viewed for enjoyment in private court gatherings of men and women. Stylistically, Guler artists had close links with imperial Mughal painting traditions prevalent in the Punjab plains to the west, which resulted in the relatively naturalistic setting and figural proportions.