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Four-armed goddess, with hearts in margin
1900s
- Medium
- ink and color on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 36.2 x 27 cm (14 1/4 x 10 5/8 in.)
- Culture
- Eastern India, Bihar, Mithila region
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Pamela Elizabeth Ward in loving memory of her parents, William E. and Evelyn Svec Ward
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This goddess holds a lotus flower and a discus, along with two other unidentified objects. Historically, Madhubani paintings were murals created with brushes made of bamboo and cotton. They ornamented domestic spaces on the occasion of a festival or rite of passage in a woman's life, such as a birth or a wedding. In the wake of a drought in 1966, the All India Handicrafts Board encouraged women of the Mithila region make paintings on paper, so they could sell them and help support their communities.
