- Title
- European Woman Drinking Wine
- Date Made
- circa 1725
- Medium
- Ink and opaque watercolor on paper
- Dimensions
- 9 1/4 x 7 in. (23.49 x 17.78 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.77.154.13
- Collecting Area
- South and Southeast Asian Art
- Curatorial Notes
This elegant European woman with curly hair wears a stylized Western woman’s riding hat with a low rounded crown, a small upturned brim, and a feather cockade. She wears a blouse with elbow-length cuffs, a long skirt, and a shawl around her shoulders. She is seated against a bolster and is drinking wine from a a small cup and a long-necked flask (surahi).
Several similar Indian images survive of fashionable European women wearing a variant of this distinctive hat (for example, see a portrait of A Foreign Lady attributed to the late 18th century in the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1982.178). The women are generally identified in scholarly and commercial literature as Portuguese, but given that such hats were worn across Europe, this geographic certainty is unwarranted. Images of women drinking wine are a frequent genre in earlier Mughal and Persian literary and pictorial traditions, but later Indian images such as this drawing may also refer to the popular perception of European licentiousness.
