SOUTHERN INDIA, RAJAMUNDRY SCHOOL, CIRCA 1750

This painting is from a rare series of the Ramayana of which eleven paintings are known and were sold at Sotheby's London in 1972. Another painting from this series is in the Philadephia Museum of Art, illustrated in S. Kramrisch, Painted Delight: Indian Paintings from the Philadelphia Collections, 1986, p. 163, no. 36. Kramrisch states that the attribution to Rajamundry is based on an unpublished article by Jagdish Mittal, who discusses a colophon in an album at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg (Ms As 4673), where the Philadelphia painting once occupied a full page.