The Unexpected Return of the Husband, a folio from a dispersed Nayika-bheda series, Mewar, circa 1630-40, opaque pigments heightened with gold within a wide red border, inscribed above in nagari, 7. pedukara asani (‘belly making position’ perhaps referring to pregnancy), repeated on reverse, 22.5 x 16.5 cmProvenance:Doris Wiener Gallery, New York, 1969Exhibited:Doris Wiener Gallery, New York, 1973 and 1976The husband, bearded from his journey or perhaps while doing his military duty, is leading his battle horse into the courtyard of his house and is greeted by a servant girl with a golden tray of fruit. His wife alas is about to be caught in flagrante in sexual congress with her lover and another woman. They are stretched out on a carpet on a balcony in a turreted haveli, depicted conceptually.The series has been little studied, it is not mentioned by Andrew Topsfield in his magisterial survey of Mewar painting in 2002. One other page from this series is in the Brooklyn Museum (Poster, Amy G., et al., Realms of Heroism: Indian Paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1994, no. 158), which has a similar type of inscription – 7, chattra asani, in which a couple are depicted seated within a pavilion or chattra in a secluded woodland glade. There the trees and landscape conventions conform to those laid out in Sahib Din’s earlier work for Rana Jagat Singh in the 1630s (Topsfield, A., Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under the Patronage of the Maharanas of Mewar, Artibus Asiae, Zurich, 2002, pp. 53-84). But Sahib Din himself never structures his composition in this confusing architectural way, which perhaps owes something to earlier Mewar work around 1630 (ibid., figs. 28, 29).Please refer to department for condition report