The River Studies

One river, two hours of the day.

On the right bank, a tiger settles at moonrise — still, unhurried, the crescent already high over the hills. On the left, a peacock stands in the first gold light of morning, its train trailing across the flowering ground. Between them runs the same silver water, the same terracotta and olive hills, the same flowering tree turned to face the other way.

Painted in the Company School manner of nineteenth-century India, where artists set closely observed animals against flat, conventionalised landscapes — the animal rendered with real weight and anatomy, the world behind it reduced to pure colour and pattern. Each piece carries its own hand-painted border in vermilion, gold and indigo, as these paintings were bound in albums.

These are original works, not reproductions of museum paintings. The compositions are ours, drawn in the tradition rather than copied from it.

Hung as a pair, the two turn toward one another.