Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Shvetambara Jain Teacher Giving Instruction
possibly by Sahib Ram (Indian, active 1745–1803)
c. 1750–60
- Medium
- gum tempera and gold on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 20 x 27.9 cm (7 7/8 x 11 in.)
- Culture
- Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput Kingdom of Jaipur
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection; Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
A manuscript lies on a low table in front of the preacher, who holds one hand up in the gesture of discourse, and the other holds a cloth to shield his mouth from insects. The audience of laypeople includes men gathered near the front of the composition, and women in a group toward the back.
The preacher and the white-clad figures behind him are Jain householder monks, permitted to grow hair and moustaches and to wear a colored shawl that indicates higher status. Householder monks in Rajasthan often served as scribes and maintained manuscript libraries.
