Description

The Story Behind This One

There is a long tradition in Indian art of painting women reading. The Mughal miniaturists were doing it centuries before Europe caught on, princesses in the zenana with a book of poetry open on their knees, an oil lamp burning, silk everywhere, the whole world shut out behind a curtain. If you have ever stood in front of those miniatures in the National Museum in Delhi you know the feeling they carry, that a woman alone with a book is a complete scene, nothing else needed.

This painting carries the same feeling from the other side of the world. Mihály Zichy painted it in 1867, and if that year sounds familiar it should, the Mughal Empire had ended barely ten years earlier when the British exiled Bahadur Shah Zafar to Rangoon. So while one great tradition of intimate court painting was being packed away in Delhi, a Hungarian court painter in Europe was, without knowing it, painting the same subject the Mughal artists had perfected. A young woman lost in a small green book, lace pillow under her head, a heavy crimson silk coverlet thrown over the bed, candlesticks on the side table. Swap the lace canopy for a marble jharokha and the composition would sit comfortably in a Mughal album.

The red is what holds the picture together. Deep crimson silk against all that white lace, the one loud thing in a very quiet scene, and anyone who has grown up around Banarasi silk or a wedding lehenga knows exactly what that shade of red does to a room.