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| View Original: | Indian_-_The_Elephant_King_Attacked_by_the_Crocodile_-_Walters_W887.jpg (1239x884) | |||
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| Keywords: Indian - The Elephant King Attacked by the Crocodile - Walters W887.jpg This picture is from a dispersed Gajendramoksha Liberation of the Elephant-King series The myth's intent like those that tell us of the avatars of Vishnu is to demonstrate Vishnu's willingness always to help when invoked by a person or even an animal with sincere faith Once while a herd of elephants was cavorting in a river their leader was attacked by a crocodile The elephant immediately began calling Vishnu and so intense was the animal's faith that the god appeared on earth and saved him Here an unknown artist has given us an expressive rendering of the vicious attack in a most imaginative manner The elephants are drawn with telling realism but the crocodile is purely a creature of fantasy and is dragon-like in appearance The behavior of the elephants--a mother protects two babies another feeds on lotuses and others amble beyond the shoreline--reveals familiarity with the pachyderm but the water the rocks and the sky are rendered conceptually though with expressiveness Most unusual is the simultaneous depiction of a cloudburst and a sunburst The dark clouds with streaks of lightning send down sheets of rain but they also clear the way for the sun to appear as a golden human head with golden rays riding a chariot drawn by white steeds ca 1650 pigments gold paper cm 30 2 21 1 accession number W 887 4851 John and Berthe Ford Baltimore date and mode of acquisition unknown Walters Art Museum John Berthe Ford 2001 place of origin Ajmer Rajasthan India Walters Art Museum license 2D Hindu art in the Walters Art Museum Media contributed by the Walters Art Museum needs category review Gajendramoksha 17th-century watercolor paintings from India Paintings of elephants Elephants in art of India 1650s paintings from India Paintings of India in the Walters Art Museum | ||||
