Miniature courtship: Elvehjem showcases India art

“Courtship in Indian Miniatures” from the Watson Collection will be on display Nov. 10-Jan. 6 in the Mayer Gallery of the Elvehjem Museum of Art.

The annual exhibition of Indian miniatures showcases the Elvehjem’s ever-popular, intimate and brightly colored miniatures from India of the 17th through 19th centuries.

While imagery of lovers and courtship play a part in the art and literature of all cultures, the images have particular meanings in the world of the Indian miniature.

The lovers in beautiful costumes and elegant settings suggest all the pleasures that are available in times of abundance. Drought and its companion famine, ever to be feared in India, are seen as the polar opposite of sexuality.

There is a strong association between imagery of lovers and that of more general fertility. In a wedding ritual, the groom says to his bride, “I am the sky; you are the earth,” symbolically taking the parts of the sky father and earth mother to create abundance.

In Rajput art, the god Krishna and his consort Radha or Shiva and Parvati embody these natural forces; later the king and queen symbolically bring fertility to the land and stave off drought and famine. Although the Mughal artists employ the same formal conventions of depicting lovers, the ancient indigenous fertility ritual has lost its force.

The artists of these works put an enormous amount of detail into small spaces, and close inspection is required to reveal their tiny nuances. Such paintings were originally created as illustrations for palm-leaf manuscripts and later for sumptuous literary volumes; the small format was preserved when the paintings were collected in albums.

The collection came to the Elvehjem through the generosity of Jane Watson, née Werner. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1936 with a bachelor of arts degree in English and worked for Western Publishing Co., 1938-58, as editor and writer.

She and her late husband, Earnest, collected these paintings when he was science attaché to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, 1960-62, and on visits to India for the next few years. The Watsons began donating works from their collection to the UW in 1964, and made regular donations through the 1980s. The Elvehjem now counts more than 260 outstanding Indian miniatures in its Watson collection.

Gautama Vajracharya, adjunct lecturer in art history, and languages and cultures of Asia, will present a slide lecture, “Courtship in Indian Miniatures from the Watson Collection,” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, L140 Elvehjem. Vajracharya will discuss India’s long tradition of visual arts showing renditions of loving, sensual couples and will explain why this subject is so popular when Indian society does not reflect couples showing physical affection.