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Leaf from a Kalighat album: Maid bringing a hookah to a lady (recto); Krishna weighed against precious objects(?) (verso)

Unknown

1890

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Patna School of Painting Impressionism Realism Late 19th Century Genre Scene Bengal Kalighat Kolkata

Dominant colour

Leaf from a Kalighat album: Maid bringing a hookah to a lady (recto); Krishna weighed against precious objects(?) (verso) is a 1890 unspecified by Unknown, a Patna School of Painting work, depicting Bengal, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1890 · Patna School of Painting
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

A woman in a red sari sits while a maid in green hands her a long-stemmed hookah. The lines are bold, the colors flat—no shading, just clear shapes. These paintings were made in Kolkata in the 1800s by street artists near the Kalighat temple. They poked fun at wealthy Indians who copied British manners, showing them as silly or vain. The hookah here might be a quiet joke about trying too hard to look fancy. Look up more paintings under the subject kalighat.

The story of this work

Overview

Kalighat paintings reflect the time and context in which they were created. Kalighat painters used their medium to offer penetrating and insightful critiques of British-influenced Indians as well as the British themselves through satires and caricatures. Newly rich Bengali native Indian clerks (babus) aspired to dress and behave like their British masters, and Kalighat painters taunted them for this. The maid, dressed in green, holds a hookah in her right hand. The lady in red is likely a fashionable high society concubine or prostitute known and depicted at this time as hookah-smoking,…

Read the full account in the museum source.