
Cleveland Museum of Art
Krishna Steals the Clothes of the Milkmaids and Expounds on the Virtue of Trees, from a Braj Bhagavata Purana
- Date
- c. 1650
- Medium
- Gum tempera on paper
- Culture
- Central India, Madhya Pradesh, Malwa
- Department
- Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 153199
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
When the milkmaids went to the Yamuna River to bathe, Krishna stealthily took their clothes and hid them in the treetops. Here, the blue-skinned Krishna sits in a tree playing his flute, waiting for the women to come to him. True devotees must shed all worldly inhibitions and approach their god with nothing to hide. The narrow register above shows Krishna expounding on the virtue of trees to the other cowherds. The illustration closely follows the extensive text, written on the back in the vernacular language of Braj, even down to the detail of how they drank the sweet water of the Yamuna River.
The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Walzer
- Provenance
- ?–1986: Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Walzer, Georgetown, CT, given to the Cleveland Museum of Art | 1986–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Cleveland Museum of Art and other institutions.