PROBABLY TIRUPATI, SOUTH INDIA, EARLY 18TH CENTURY

This and the following lot once belonged to a sequence of ten to fifteen cotton panels which were originally joined together like an accordion to form a temple hanging celebrating the glory of Vishnu. According to Vidhya Dehejia, who publishes three paintings from the same series in Thomas Lawton and Thomas W. Lentz, Beyond the Legacy: Anniversary Acquisitions for the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1998, pp. 196-197, when the first southern Indian paintings in this style emerged, they were variously assigned to the eastern state of Orissa, or to Mysore or Seringapatam in the southern state of Karnataka. Jagdish Mittal originally assigned these paintings to Seringapatam but now, revising his own attribution, believes that they were produced at the Venkatesvara temple in Tirupati, in the South of Andhra Pradesh near to the border with Tamil Nadu.