"Bhil Couple Hunting Deer at Night", Folio from the Davis Album

Unknown

mid-18th century · Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper · Islamic Art

Night hunts were a favorite object of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mughal painters, serving as settings for both royal hunts and for a genre of paintings featuring tribal forest dwellers, such as the couple seen here dressed in leaf skirts and hunting deer. The woman catches the herd's attention with a torch while her companion shoots an arrow, felling the stag. Their village of thatched huts, set in a forest clearing, occupies the middle ground. Illuminated by the soft glow of the moon, the composition is a study in light and shadow, the master exponent of which in the mid-eighteenth century was the painter Mir Kalan Khan, whose atelier may have been responsible for this painting.

Artist

Unknown

Date

mid-18th century

Medium

Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper

Department

Islamic Art

Credit line

Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915