KRISHNA and RADHA by the Lotus Pond

This is the quiet half of the Krishna story — not the battlefield or the cosmic sleep, but an evening in the grove. Krishna stands at the left, his body the deep blue-green of rain cloud, crowned with the peacock plume and haloed in a gold nimbus. Radha leans against him in a long diagonal, her striped blue garment sweeping across the whole lower right of the panel like a river.

In her raised hand is a peacock-feather fan; a peacock hangs  down from the branch above, watching. A deer stands half-hidden at the left edge, a mandarin duck rests in the reeds at the right, and the pond at their feet is thick with pink lotus, curling water-scrolls, fish and lily pads — the whole natural world drawn in as witness.

The sky is worked in the classic Kerala stipple, a saffron and orange field cooled by rows of white cloud-scrolls, so that the light reads as the last hour of the day. The flowering tree at the right, with its purple buds and hanging aerial roots, closes the composition like a curtain.

Every ornament — the tiered gold collars, the pearl strands, the bluish green earings and a matching necklace, the beaded girdles — is drawn with a fine-hair brush over the finished colour.